Marvell ARMADA 1500 HD Media SoC to enable new generation of Google TV

Marvell has announced a new SoC that it claims will enable a new generation of Google TVs to come to market. The chip is called the ARMADA 1500 HD Media SoC. The company says the new chip will enable OEMs to deliver immersive home entertainment experiences with Google TV products. The chip recently passed Google's certification process.

The new SoC is powerful and energy-efficient and designed to be a very affordable. Marvell says that this ARMADA 1500 chip is first ARM-based platform be used by multiple OEMs and certified for Google TV. It uses an ARM v7 compatible PJ4B SMP super-scalar dual-core CPU to enable computer-like processing power. The chip also supports web browsing and Flash.

Marvell says that the chip offers more than 6000 Dhrystone MIPS computing power. The chip also contains a Qdeo video processing chip that supports HD and 3-D video along with providing scaling, noise reduction, de-interlacing, low bit rate Internet video enhancement, and color and contrast enhancements. The chip also features VMeta multiformat video decoding, encoding, and transcoding. VMeta is capable of decoding up to two simultaneous 1080p streams. There's no indication of when we might see products using the new SoC on the market.