The original 2013 Chromecast had a Cortex A9 single core Armada 1500 mini 88DE3005 optimised for Chromecast, Netflix and YouTube streaming. The new Chromecast 2 comes with a dual-core ARM Cortex A7 system can deliver up to 4900 DMIPS performance. The SoC has better DRM security support. According to Marvell this is 2.5 times faster than the Armada 1500 mini under the bonnet of the original Chromecast. 

Weili Dai, President and Co-Founder at Marvell said:

“I am very excited to see the successful launch of Google’s Chromecast 2.0 and Chromecast Audio. This is another great milestone in our long relationship with Google, and together we are proud to be at the forefront of innovating Smart devices that better peoples’ lives, I would like to thank Google and our global team of talented engineers for their hard work and outstanding collaboration in developing advanced technology that power today’s smart devices.”

The new SoC supports playback of 1080p at 60 FPS with 12 bit deep colour and has a 3G GPU with Open GL ES 1.1 or 2.0 support. The SoC has support from Qdeo video processor, USB, SDIO, SPI or UART.

Marvell insists that the ARMADA1500 Mini Plus supports a variety of devices including Smart TVs, over-the-top (OTT) set-top boxes (STB) and other OTT platforms and TV dongles so we might end up seeing it in some similar devices too.

It looks like that the new Chromecast has got the updated processor that now has dual core processor instead of single core with Chromecast from 2013.