Marvell Technology said today that it’s figured out a way to deliver the first-ever quad-core ARM-based application processor for cell phones and other mobile devices. More cores equals more performance, of course, and Marvell says its quad-core ARM chips will deliver “gigahertz-plus” performance.
Currently Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset is the leader in ARM-based processors for phones, with 1 Ghz of performance. In terms of having identical processors working on the same computing problem, sometimes called symmetric multicore processing, there aren’t any chips doing symmetric multicore processing running in today’s phones. Rather most cell-phone applications processors have multiple cores, with one handling computing, another doing graphics and another taking on multimedia. Marvell’s quad-core would deliver four CPUs — or four times that of today’s applications processors.
