Marvell's new Ultra HD chipset is a high-powered SoC that supports Android-based TV services and the cable industry's RDK software stack.

Mari Silbey, Senior Editor, Cable/Video

April 27, 2015

2 Min Read
Marvell Goes 4K With Android TV Chipset

Stepping into the 4K TV space, Marvell is adding a new Ultra HD system-on-a-chip (SoC) product to its Armada 1500 line of Android TV chipsets.

Designed for 4K TV and set-top gaming services, Marvell Technology Group Ltd. (Nasdaq: MRVL)'s Armada 1500 Ultra includes a quad core, 64-bit ARM CPU with up to 14K DMIPS, and an 8-core graphics processor. The high-powered SoC is also notable for supporting the cable industry's Reference Design Kit (RDK) IP video software stack, as well as for integrating Verimatrix Inc. 's carrier-class VCAS Ultra security solution with VideoMark forensic watermarking.

Want to know more about 4K, multiscreen and other next-gen video technologies? They will be a few of the many topics covered at Light Reading's second Big Telecom Event on June 9-10 in Chicago, which will include a special Video Summit. Sign up today!

Marvell is best known in the Android TV field for powering Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)'s Chromecast HDMI streaming stick. However, the company has also spread its wings in the service provider space through customer deployments with several South Korean operators, Swisscom AG (NYSE: SCM) in Switzerland and Bouygues Telecom in France. With its chipsets now embedded in both set-tops and HDMI adapters, Marvell Senior Product Manager Edward Silva told Light Reading that the company continues to see interest in the HDMI stick form factor globally, particularly among telecom providers with both mobile and fixed-line subscribers.

”The engagements that we have in that area are… right now further along outside the US," said Silva, "but the US operators, they're also looking at this."

From a multiscreen perspective, the Armada 1500 Ultra can deliver an Ultra HD stream while also supporting a picture-in-picture window and simultaneously transcoding content for viewing on another device. The chipset can support four concurrent video streams at 1080p resolution, and even more at a lower resolution rate.

"[We've] potentially tripled the CPU performance," said Silva. "Our GPU has gone up many factors to address games…And of course we've done all this by minimizing and actually helping to shrink the form factors and cost involved."

Marvell will demonstrate its new Armada 1500 Ultra SoC at the TV Connect event in London later this week.

— Mari Silbey, special to Light Reading

About the Author(s)

Mari Silbey

Senior Editor, Cable/Video

Mari Silbey is a senior editor covering broadband infrastructure, video delivery, smart cities and all things cable. Previously, she worked independently for nearly a decade, contributing to trade publications, authoring custom research reports and consulting for a variety of corporate and association clients. Among her storied (and sometimes dubious) achievements, Mari launched the corporate blog for Motorola's Home division way back in 2007, ran a content development program for Limelight Networks and did her best to entertain the video nerd masses as a long-time columnist for the media blog Zatz Not Funny. She is based in Washington, D.C.

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