Marvell announces PXA1088 quad-core SoC for globetrotting phones and tablets  

Marvell made waves last year with its802.11ac wireless chips, but the company's looking to make a splash in 2013 with a new quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 SoC. Called the PXA1088, the new silicon's calling card -- other than those four CPU cores -- is its ability to beam 3G data to mobile devices anywhere in the world thanks to auto-roaming and compatibility with 21Mbps HSPA+, TD-HSPA+, EDGE, and WCDMA networks. In addition to those cellular radios, it also has an Avastar 88W8777 chip that brings WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 and FM radio, plus it has a GPS and GLONASS location processor on board.

Worldwide connectivity isn't the PXA1088's only trick, either. It's got some serious video chops thanks to a hardware 1080p encoder and decoder, and a GPU from Vivante compliant with OpenGL ES 2.0 and 1.1 as well as OpenVG 1.1. Can't wait to get your grubby mitts on a phone packing Marvell's latest? The company tells us that several well-known OEMs will be rolling out devices with the PXA1088 in the first half of the year. Of course, we're hoping to see a few of them ourselves next week at Mobile World Congress, so stay tuned.

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