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Fujitsu Announces XScale PDA
Andrew Slough writes: "Fujitsu has announced the world's first PDA based on Intel's XScale architecture, making this the fastest ARM PDA in the world! Stories also at at Infosync and The Register. Pictures at PocketNow."
Fujitsu's press release just said the chip was "high-performance", and after some digging I turned up this article which tells us that the Intel PXA250 can run at speeds as high as 400MHz. An excerpt:
Designed for advanced PDAs, the PXA250 is available at speeds of 200MHz, 300MHz, and 400MHz. While designed for low power, the PXA250 offers a Turbo Mode for application acceleration and multimedia acceleration with Intel Media Processing technology. USB, 920Kbps Bluetooth wireless, and a 1.84MHz baseband interface are offered as communication interfaces, and an enhanced memory support 2.5 volt or 3.3 volt 16-bit or 32-bit memory.
I feel so Dirty.
I'm a 2000 man.
...that's gravy. It's strength is its power consumption.
The Xscale at 200Mhz will be using about 50mW, about the same as a Palm processor runs at now. Compare to the current StrongARM, which at 233Mhz (a slightly overclocked Ipaq) sucks down 900mw. The Xscale will be 15x or so less power-hungry than the StrongARM at 200.
Or in other words, for the same power you get 5.4 mips with a 33 MHz Palm vs. over 300 mips for a Xscale.
It also has an advantage as it "scales" what it needs depending on the app, hence the name. So if you are running a memopad type function, it will need less power, and if you are running Quake or something, it will go full-bore. Think of it as intelligent underclocking when needed.
So in summary, the Xscale can have the computing power of a current Ipaq (more actually, they tweaked the core), at the same power consumption as a Palm (or much less depending on what types of apps you run). At 400Mhz, it will use about 3x the power of a Palm processor, but this will still be 5-6x less power than the StrongARM running at half the speed.