http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/02/11/020211hnxscale.xml?0211mnpm

INTEL ON MONDAY ushered in the dawn of its X-Scale architecture for multimedia phones and advanced PDAs with the launch of two new X-Scale chips.

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. Targeted at simpler handheld devices, the PXA210 runs between 133MHz and 200MHz and offers variable power 16-bit memory.

Built to 0.18-micron architecture, the two new X-Scale chips use less than half the power of their predecessor, the SA-1110, when operating in run mode. Both chips are tuned for Java and run operating systems from Microsoft, Palm, Symbian, and Linux.

Don't think a ZIF socket would help, I seriously doubt they're pin-compatible

Xscale chips are in theory quite nice, though ISTR there have been problems getting linux running well on them - some MMU strangeness IIRC. Can't wait to see some products with the new chips in them though!

Hugo

Yeah, i was just kidding about the zif socket thing. Seen as the StrongARM is a lot more than just the CPU.

Have you been following the X-Scale much? When they announced them years ago they were talking about 800Mhz. These ones that are now finally available don't seem particularly impressive. 400Mhz is nice but they've been stuck at 220Mhz for a long time now.

About the only big feature i can see is half the power consumption, is there more to be excited about?

There are faster Xscales, this is just the "all in 1" integrated chip, like the SA1110. The original Xscale core chips (require lots of support circuitry) run at something like 733MHz. Obviously they decided that PDAs don't need all that speed (or it'd take too much juice).

Hugo