Comments by Marvell Executive May Hint at Armada Processor Inside Nintendo 3DS

From X-bit Labs: More details transpire about the hardware inside the forthcoming Nintendo 3DS portable video game system. The chief executive officer of Marvell Technology, one of the world's largest makers of various application, communication, multimedia and other special-purpose processors, said during the quarterly conference call with financial analysts that one of Marvell Armada processors powers a major new gaming platform.

"Approximately 15% of the sequential increase was due to the initial production revenue from our Armada application processors, primarily as a result of a major customer preparing to launch a new gaming platform," said Sehat Sutardja, chief executive officer of Armada.

While Mr. Sutardja did not directly point to Nintendo 3DS, the latter is the only major company to release a new game platform in the near future. There is a possibility that a new player on the mobile gaming market will roll-out its own game console, but given the market realities, there would have been leaks about the project in advance.

It is unclear which exactly Armada chip is used. One of the likely candidates is Armada 500 that uses ARM v7 CPU core running up to 1.2 GHz, vector floating point (VFP) v3 and 512KB L2 cache, 1080p video decode, 16MT/s/3D graphics, WUXGA LCD resolution support, security acceleration and consumer/embedded oriented I/O's (PCIe, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, SDIO, DDR2/DDR3, S-ATA, MIPI CSI and more). Another possibility is usage of lower-power Armada 600 chip that has ARM v7 CPU core at up to 1GHz, VFP v3 and 256KB L2 cache.

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