I can't agree more on some of the comments of Marvell CEO Sehat Sutardja:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/show ... =216403578

I bet everything I have in the ARM+Linux combo.

And it will be interesting to see if anything comes out of the Anubis effort. That could become something cool!

I'm not betting anything though... ;-)

that begs the question what your current net worth is : )

while i too think that arm+linux (or arm+proprietary - cue in apple) have the momentum which will only grow bigger in the years to come, that article you're referring to does not exactly nail this. at least on paper, sheeva does not seem to be the flagman of anything (my middle-class gsm already has a fast arm9 and runs forever on a 950mAh), and last time i checked the DPF market had already established ASIC players, alas, not marvell. so i'm not sure what exactly is the break-through here that we should be all excited about. aside from marvell CEO's bright visions, that is. actually, i'm more concerned of marvell's unwillingness to stand up against wintel. heck, if nvidia can show teeth to intel (ion & tegra), then i don't see why marvell could not. you don't become successful until you supply people's nearest and dearest gadgets. right now that latter shifts from people's pc's and laptops to their ultra mobile devices - and, coincidentally, intel lags behind there (despite the pc OEMs endorsements of the atom, the consumer is not that keen on it), so if not now then marvell wold never stand a chance against wintel.

From the article:
"Marvell contends that the Android platform will play a big role in spreading Sheeva CPUs in divergent consumer electronics devices.
In Sutardja's mind, Internet-connected consumer devices will share many of the feature sets available in smartphones. "Connected digital photo frames, for example, are in many ways like smartphones without the function of making voice calls," he said.
I guess, you don't know that Android is Linux+Java.
What's fast? 400 Mhz?, Obviusly you didn't read the spects of the kirkwood processors, they have some unique things:
• ARM9 at 1.2 Ghz operating speed
• 16-bit DDR2 memory interface (up to 800 MHz data rate.)
• Two Gigabit Ethernet MACs with interface options
• Single PCI-Express port
• Single USB 2.0 port with integrated PHY
• Two SATA 2.0 ports with integrated PHYs
• Network security engine with various encryption algorithm support
• Audio and MPEG Transport Stream Interface
• Two TDM Channels, SDIO, NAND flash, SPI, TWSI, and Two UART interfaces

Development kit at $99... again with LINUX OS.
Wow, you didn't get excited?.. who cares..

i'm sorry but i somehow can't see the big, bright future in DPFs. again, my question remains: what will bring the 'billion of consumers' to marvell's product? the sheeva design? well, newsflash: TI, freescale and qualcomm have theirs too, and a hefty consumer market penetration too, in the form of handheld consumer devices by the leading CE vendors. and yes, their engineering boards are in the 100usd range too. will mobile handset vendors choose marvell for their next high-end products? or maybe a new CE player will emerge, apple's ipod/iphone style? well, apple are expected to move to in-house arm design for the iphone's successor (and whatever lineup of tablet-like devices they have planned). plug computing? set-top boxes? surely the likes of you and me will give it a try, but 'billion of consumers'?

don't get me wrong, i'm not trying to rain on your parade, i'm just being skeptical of marvell's market expansion visions, not in the way they describe it. at least. also, i'm not saying sheeva is bad (on the contrary - the more potent netbook-class SoCs - the better), i'm not just seeing what's so special about it that would meet marvell's grandeur market plans of people rushing to put netbook-class hw in their photoframes.

ps: android is totally irrelevant here. or rather - it's an omni-relevant - everybody could take the android advantage. heck, atom could potentially, too.