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Research In Motion is expected to launch a BlackBerry tablet later this year or early next year. That much is pretty certain at this point. But we’ve been hearing rumors about what kind of specs the tablet will have for months, and until RIM actually gets around to announcing the device, I’m going to keep filing the specs people are throwing around in the rumor category.

That said, a market analyst has reportedly suggested that the BlackBerry Tablet will be powered by a 1GHz Marvell CPU. And that’s kind of interesting, even for a rumor.

Marvell makes low power, ARM-based chips. The company’s processors are quite popular in the eBook reader space, but getting their chips into the BlackBerry tablet would be a big win for Marvell. I’ve seen concept devices with Marvell processors that could run Ubuntu Linux and handle HD video playback in the past, so there’s no reason a 1GHz Marvell chip wouldn’t be powerful enough to handle the web browsing, email, and video conferencing capabilities RIM is expected to pack into the tablet.

Marvell has also been pumping out reference designs for tablets for a little while. Earlier this year the company introduced a platform for designing a tablet that could sell for as little as $99 with a Marvell Armada 600 series chip. And a prototype device with a Marvell Armada 610 processor crashed a Netbook event in May.