ESC - The ARMADA 310 processor drives greener embedded enterprise apps

Santa Clara, Calif. - Marvell announced a new addition to the ARMADA family of application processors in honor of Earth Day 2010 - the Marvell ARMADA 310. The new system-on-a-chip (SoC) is designed to deliver scalable performance of up to 1GHz while consuming less than 1 Watt - an industry benchmark for the enterprise application developer community.

The ARMADA 310 enables greener embedded enterprise applications with gigahertz-class performance to muscle computing horsepower for digital homes and small and remote office applications, as well as for new intelligent solutions for Plug Computing, medical, financial and point-of-sale (POS) markets.

The advanced processor also offers designers the opportunity to develop high performance, power-efficient green systems with smaller form factors for a variety of peripherals such as routers, microservers, dongles, PC cards, industrial and medical systems.

With the ongoing demand for sustainable enterprise developments and energy efficient green technology, embedded application developers need smarter processors capable of delivering high levels of performance while consuming lower power, the new ARMADA 310 is designed to do just that - the solutions offers a variety of performance features while meeting the community's demand to lower carbon footprint.

The ARMADA 310 offers scalable performance from 600MHz to 1GHz and the ability to power down as low as 700mW. To help maximize bandwidth, reduce power consumption and drive down system cost, the new SoC features an on-chip 16-bit DDR2/3 interface. The highly integrated IC also drives down bill of material (BOM) costs by adding a wide variety of communications options including two PCI-express bus interfaces, two Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) MACs, a USB 2.0 compliant port with an integrated PHY that can serve as a peripheral or host, and an embedded 16-bit LCD controller.

By integrating extensive connectivity capabilities into a highly scalable ARM-based SoC, the ARMADA 310 offers designers the opportunity to create small-form factor, high-performance, devices that easily link to other systems and outside networks.

The CPU core on the ARMADA 310 was developed by Marvell and is ARMv5TE compliant. It features a four-way, set-associative L1 16 KB I-cache /16-KB D-cache and a 256-KB, unified four-way, set-associative L2 cache. To maximize throughput the chip uses an innovative on-chip crossbar architecture that enables concurrent transactions among multiple units.

The Armada 310 comes with two SATA 2.0 ports with integrated PHY, a variety'of boot options including NAND Flash and DDR2/3, and audio support with two TDM Channels. Interfaces include SDIO/MMC, NAND flash, SPI, two TWSI, and two UARTs. The network security engine supports a variety of encryption algorithms. A DMA/XOR engine with four channels is included, as well as RTC and themal sensor.

To help minimize end product footprint, the new green SoC comes in a highly compact 15 x 15 mm Flip-Chip Ball Grid Array (FCBGA). The ARMADA 310 is available immediately and sells for under $15 in 10Ku quantities.

For more information visit http://www.marvell.com.