In a move bound to ramp up speculation, the boss of US chip company Marvell has revealed that it's working with a major customer preparing to launch a new portable gaming platform.

The information was provided as part of an analysts' call about the company's Q2 FY2011 figures.

In terms of the company's mobile and wireless performance, this was impressive with sales up over 50 percent quarter-on-quarter.

"Approximately 15% of the sequential increase was due to the initial production revenue from our Armada application processors, primarily as a result of a major customer preparing to launch a new gaming platform," said chairman, CEO and president Sehat Sutardja.

Upfront cash

As mobile and wireless accounts for around a third of Marvell's total revenue - around $300 million in Q2 FY2011 - this means the initial production revenue from this one client was worth around $20 million.

Marvell's Armada family of chips covers everything from digital picture frames and set top boxes to smartphones, tablets and netbooks.

Based on ARM v7 core designs - the equivalent of ARM's own Cortex A8 that power the iPhone 4 and iPad - the most powerful Armada chips are 1.2 GHz processors offering OpenGL 2.0 graphics.

Sutardja also stated 55 percent of the company's growth (around $80 million) was due to embedded wi-fi products in new and existing gaming systems [Marvell chips are used in Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PSP amongst others], combined with the continued adoptions within the imaging and enterprise markets.

Mysterious stranger

Of course, in term of that major customer, there's one simple explanation.

Nintendo's 3DS is the only formally announced new gaming platform, which is due out before the end of the company's financial year i.e. March 2011.

Hence, a Marvell Armada design could be used in conjunction with DMP's PICA200 GPU core. (The 3DS' CPU has yet been revealed.) This might be messy to design as Armada chips already contains integrated graphics silicon, but wouldn't be impossible, and the timing seems right.

Alternatively, there could be more some speculative suspects.

Sony could be working on a new PSP. Microsoft might be planning to use its Windows Phone 7 OS in terms of making something specific for gaming, or A.N.Other OEM such as HP, Samsung, Google or Dell/Alienware could be cooking up a gaming tablet.

Hey. Perhaps Nokia (and Intel) are going to attempt N-Gage III, this time with MeeGo?

[source: Seeking Alpha]