By Scott Martin

Marvell Technology unveiled three renditions Wednesday of higher-horsepower handheld chips, products of the Xscale unit it recently acquired from Intel.

The communications chip maker touted the chips’ low power consumption and increase in performance as compelling arguments for the chips to be used to speed Internet browsing on smart phones. It expects the chips will be used in phones starting early next year.

Marvell agreed to acquire Intel’s Xscale unit for $600 million in June, a deal that allowed the troubled chip giant to focus on its core business (see Intel Sells Xscale Unit: $600M).

Intel Sells Xscale Unit: $600M

The Xscale unit gave Marvell a line of applications processors similar to those on which it was already working.

“You get the power when you need it; otherwise you fall back to very low power operation,” Sam Arditi, senior vice president of Marvell’s cellular handheld group, said of the new line of chips. “We’re talking about MP3 players going for 30 hours.”

Under the deal, Intel’s communications chip business, maker of the Xscale, was rolled under the Marvell business, a transaction that closed November 8. The Xscale unit had provided chips used in RIM’s BlackBerry, Palm’s Treo, and Motorola’s Q, among other handhelds. The Intel unit brought more than 1,200 new employees to Marvell by the close of the acquisition.

The PXA300, PXA310, and PXA320 chips are notable for their power boost. The PXA320, zippiest of the bunch, is scalable to 806MHz. The PXA310 will deliver 624MHz performance. Marvell has clocked as high as 1.2GHz on the PXA320 chip, leaving headroom for performance improvements.

“We had very few that went to 600MHz,” said Mr. Ardit. “In previous generations, maybe 10 percent of our silicon was high performance. We believe that the 600 [MHz] version will absolutely be used.”

The concerns over faster chips usually begin with battery consumption. But Marvell points out that its PXA3xx products feature so-called frequency scalability, which allows for better performance and lower power use.

Significant Boost

Max Baron, principal analyst at In-Stat, said that the performance enhancements were significant.

“The bottom line is that you will see an improvement,” Mr. Baron said.

However, he added that more work would be needed from those designing the systems, especially if the chips are to ever reach their potential higher numbers. He indicated that if Marvell were to use frequency scalability, the company would achieve some significant power savings.

“That could provide significant savings in battery life,” Mr. Baron said. “The idea is that you want to fit the frequency for the application. If they have frequency scalability, that would be interesting.”