Marvel is not necessary a known name by consumers in the IT industry but that doesn’t mean it’s not the producer of many of the chip found today inside smartphones and other mobile devices. They’re the ones making the Snapdragon 1GHz CPUs found in the latest smartphones. They’ve announced a few months ago the Armada chipset, specially designed for slim tablets that can run mobile OSes like Android, Chrome OS, not desktop versions like Windows 7.

    Now Marvell even has a prototype up and running, showcased during Netbook Summit in San Francisco. From what Engadget has seen, the Marvell 10 inch tablet prototype was running Android 2.1 Eclair and was a really thing and light tablet, similar to the iPad. Imagine that a prototype is usually something not finished in terms of design and its role is to showcase a concept, so this interesting prototypes points towards very slim consumer tablets, even thinner than the iPad and better powered, as the Marvell Armada 610 architecture is capable of Full HD 1080 video decoding. MicroSDHC ports can be used to extend the amount of the internal memory, and the HDMI port will be used to output videos to a bigger screen. Given the fact that Marvell has produced the Armada as a low cost mobile CPU it will be interesting to see the real cost, which was not yet announced officially.

    Marvell tablet prototype with metal back case

    Marvell tablet prototype with metal back case