Marvell’s Tri-core ARMADA 628 Processor Announced

Looks like earlier reports of a tri-core processor from Marvell were right on the money as the company has introduced the world’s first 1.5GHz tri-core application processor – the Marvell ARMADA 628. The chip is a full System-on-a-Chip design (SoC) with three high performance cores. The 624MHz third core in this chip is designed to support routine user tasks and acts as a system management processor to monitor and dynamically scale power and performance. Aside from the tri-core CPU, there are six additional processing engines to support 3D graphics, 1080p video encoding and decoding. It’s also designed to be the first mobile CPU to provide high speed USB 3.0 connectivity, touted to offer 10x faster performance than USB 2.0. The chip is currently ready for sampling to Marvell’s customers.