Marvell ARMADA 618 Video Demo

Remember Marvell's ARMADA 618 chipset from last Friday, the 1GHz low-power smartphone processor good for three separate, independent displays and Full HD 1080p quality?  The company have brought along a few demo devices to MobileFocus 2010 this week, and they've been showing off just what the ARMADA 618 is capable of.  Two demo stations were set up, one with a compact PMP-style device plugged, via HDMI, into a full-sized 1080p plasma TV, and another running a second, compact LCD panel.

Each device was running a benchmarking demo video on the main unit, and playing video on the second panel.  The 1080p HD feed was smooth and jitter-free, but according to Marvell the main 1GHz CPU isn't under stress; that means you can continue using the device for other things even during high-resolution playback.

We asked the Marvell team what differentiated the ARMADA 618 from NVIDIA's second-gen Tegra or Qualcomm's Snapdragon.  According to them, the 618 is more efficient and directly suited to smartphones than the NVIDIA platform; however unlike Snapdragon the 618 has direct Blu-ray bitstream playback, and if you had suitable drivers you could apparently plug in a Blu-ray drive and begin playing back footage from your smartphone.

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Products based on the Marvell ARMADA 618 are expected to hit the market by the end of 2010.