Marvell is moving beyond its core markets of storage, communications, and consumer chips and into the CPU business with a series of ARM-based chips called Armada. These chips put the company in a competitive position with Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), Qualcomm and nVidia and other companies with an Atom and/or ARM initiative.

Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) is one of only a few ARM licensees with an architecture license from ARM, meaning it can not only modify the core design of the processor, it can add to it.

Doing its own cores "gives us significant cost savings because we can make chips smaller and add a huge performance boost," Allen Leibovitch, a marketing manager at Marvell told InternetNews.com. Marvell also has other technologies it can add to the chips, such as color processing, Blu-ray laser and XScale, which it acquired from Intel.

There are four Armada processors, each designed for distinct markets. The 100 series is for low-end devices, mobile Internet devices and connected consumer products. The 500 series is for high-end smartbooks and tablets, the 500 series is for high-end smartphones, and the 1000 series will go into high definition devices like TVs.

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