Marvell is planning a new chip that could be a major speed update for both smartphones and tablets, an insider reportedly said Wednesday. The Armada 628 would have three cores rather than the two being promised by most. Dow Jones' source explained that it would reduce power use by reducing the workload and would serve as a traffic controller, using the third core to juggle data between the first two.
The One Laptop Per Child project team today said it was stepping up the schedule for its XO-3 tablet. The touchscreen, sub-$100 tablet is now due to have first appearance at CES 2011, two years ahead of schedule, but will shed some of its original ambitions to get to that point. It should instead be based on Marvell's Moby platform and use a 1GHz ARM processor; the design won't use an all-plastic, waterproof shell and should be thicker than the quarter inch set out earlier as a target.
Marvell today at the Netbook Summit showed a mystery 10-inch tablet. The aluminum-shelled slate would be based on the company's Moby reference design and would combine Android 2.1 with Marvell's high-speed Armada 610 processor. Little else is clear about the design, but it would have space for a front camera.
