Come, Marvell at new XScale chips

The name, previously widely rumoured to be PXA290, has been increased to 300, presumably as a result of inflation. We had heard this rumour at the embedded Systems show in Birmingham, however the prior announcement of several Monahans-based products with "290" in the codename made us question the reliability of this.

While Intel, who previously owned the XScale architecture, had earlier demonstrated the chips running at 1.2 GHz, it appears that plans had been scaled back considerably, presumably to improve yields.

The bottom of the range PXA300, formerly known as Monahans-L, runs at up to 624 MHz: similar to the fastest previous generation XScale products, but with lower power. It also adds support for DDR2 and has an on-chip 256KB frame buffer.

Next comes the PXA310 (Monahans-LV), also running at up to 624MHz, but with integrated hardware video acceleration designed to allow VGA resolution video playback. It also features an improved camera interface supporting up to five megapixel sensors, and DRM built onto the chip. Oh good.

The top end PXA320 (Monahans-P) as an on chip 256 KB L2 cache, features the highest clock speeds, and a 768KB video frame buffer to support larger screen resolutions.

The PXA3x0 series, like some versions of the PXA 270 before it, can support stacked SDRAM and flash on the same package in order to reduce PCB space. However, it is only the top end PXA320 that can take advantage of the increased bandwidth of DDR2; the low-end models only support 16-bit interfacing.

The entire series benefits from a revision to Intel's WMMX extension set, with increased SIMD performance. This is quite a different tactic too much of its competition, who has instead chosen to integrate DSP functionality onto the chip.

However, the core architecture remains compatible with the ARM5TE instruction set which, while not the newest or most efficient of architectures, will allow good compatibility with older applications.

Like Intel before them, Marvell are hoping the chips will gain design wins in embedded, cellular, PDA and GPS applications to name a few, and are hoping that the increased performance and reduced power consumption will lead to this chip division becoming profitable where Intel previously failed.

However, the market has moved on since the days of the PXA270, with strong new chips from Texas Instruments, Samsung and Freescale to name but a few. µ

L'INQs
PXA300
PXA310
PXA320
Marvell Press Release