Marvell hopes $50 'plug computers' will Web-enable our hard drives

According to a report published last August by analyst Linley Gwennap, of The Linley Group, Marvell shipped more than 300 million processors in 2007 to control hard drives, power BlackBerries and other smartphones, iPods, GPS systems and e-book readers such as Amazon.com's Kindle.

Revenues have grown 36-fold since 2000. The company, which employees 5,000 workers, is now larger than many of its far-older Silicon Valley peers, recording $2.9 billion in revenue last year.

A major misstep for Marvell was a financial scandal involving backdated stock options that included Sutardja and Dai. It was settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission last year.

Marvell's chips are usually embedded deep into devices for which the market is already established. Thus, it has never had to "publicize its design efforts," Gwennap wrote.

But with the SheevaPlug, Marvell is stepping firmly into the general-purpose CPU turf, and is thus finding itself having to define a potential market and build an ecosystem for the first time.

Marvell has already announced a handful of other resellers that plan to build plug computers. But it hopes to attract far more, so that it can eventually price its SheevaPlug chips low enough for vendors to profitably sell plug computers for as little as $49, Mukhopadhyay said.

Besides price and ease of use, Marvell is touting the SheevaPlug's greenness. A plug computer should draw only about 3 watts of electrical power, Mukhopadhyay said. That compares to the 65 to 250 watts of most desktop PCs.

While the first wave of SheevaPlug devices will be focused on supercharging storage gear, there are already vendors considering whether to build antivirus devices that would scan network traffic for malware and allow users to uninstall antivirus software on their local PCs, Mukhopadhyay said.

And "there's nothing stopping an OEM from slapping a hard disk and more memory onto a SheevaPlug and making a netbook out of it," he added.