New Marvell Quad-Core CPU Is Aimed at HPC and Servers

After a fairly long time during which ARM stated its intention to power processors aimed at the enterprise market, Marvell seems to have finally turned this goal into a reality with the ARMADA XP.

So far, the x86 architecture has practically owned not just the consumer, but the enterprise market as well.

This is quite obvious from the fact that servers, data centers and HPC (high-performance computing) systems, supercomputers as it were, use either AMD or Intel chips.

Now, Marvell has issued a press release to announce that it has completed the very first ARM-based chip that is to be used in the making of such applications.

It is known as ARMADA XP and, on just 10 watts of power, provides a performance of 16.600 DMIPS.

It is a quad-core chip whose frequency can go as high as 1.6 GHz and which has 2 MB of L2 cache and a memory interface of 64 bits, with support for DDR3, DDR3 and DDR3L memory, plus ECC.

Said chips also has the benefits of four PCI-e Gen 2.0 units, multiple USB ports, up to 16 high-speed multi-functional Marvell SERDES lanes (PCI-e, SATA, SGMII, QSGMII) as well as four Gigabit networking ports.

The Marvell ARMADA XP is already sampling to customers.

"Marvell's introduction of a powerful solution for enterprise-class cloud computing applications is a very important milestone in the mobile Internet revolution - cloud computing mobile servers like those powered by the ARMADA XP are the key link in what I envision to be a seamless, unified ecosystem of mobile connected devices, information appliances and smart 'furnishings,'" said Weili Dai, Co-Founder of Marvell.

"Marvell's leadership in mobility, consumer, storage, enterprise networking and Wi-Fi products completes the circuit, delivering a powerful end-to-end total solution to anyone connected to the new global mesh, from consumers to small business and the enterprise," Dai added.

Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/New-Marvell-Quad-Core-CPU-Is-Aimed-at-HPC-and-Servers-165338.shtml