Marvell is a company you don’t hear about too often these days. The company makes chips for various types of devices, including mobile phones and tablets. Today they’ve announced the PXA1088 LTE, which they’re calling the “industry’s first mass market quad-core 5-mode Category 4 LTE single-chip solution”. What exactly does that mean?

Let’s start with the quad-core bit. It’s not four ARM Cortex A15 cores, nor is it four ARM Cortex A9 cores. No, we’re talking four ARM Cortex A7 cores here. That means you’ll get the type of performance you used to see in the dual-core Snapdragon S4 way back in 2012.

Next up is “5-mode Category 4 LTE”. Category 4 simply means the LTE can do 150 megabits per second down and 50 megabits per second up. And “5-mode” refers to the fact that this new SoC supports TDD-LTE, FDD-LTE, HSPA+, TD-HSPA+, and good old fashioned GSM.

Normally I’d gloss over this news since I can’t remember the last time I read about a phone that used a Marvell chip, but the company claims they’re “making significant progress” with “global Tier-1 OEMs”. The name Samsung comes to my mind, but then again they’re good friends with Broadcom, so … I’m left conflicted.

Unfortunately, there’s no information in Marvell’s press release about when devices with the PXA1088 LTE will hit the market, so your guess is as good as mine. What I do know is that affordable 4G LTE devices will be important as operators in emerging markets start turning on their new networks.