Even as the PDA makes its last desperate gasps for air, PDA processors have made a giant leap in power. Maybe there's a little life left in the platform yet.
ARM has announced a 1GHz mobile processor, the Cortex-A8. Built on 65-nanometer architecture, this speedy little powerplant conserves battery power surprisingly well for its speed, operating on only 300mW. That means we can look forward to astoundingly fast cell phone apps, and perhaps some truly robust PDA enhancements, too. I'm holding out hope that this processor will find its way into ultralight notebooks and the like, because its high speed and low power consumption would probably make it ideal for taking basic business productivity on the road.
Freescale, Matsushita, Samsung and Texas Instruments have signed on to produce the chip, but I'm more interested in seeing what kinds of products the Cortex-A8 will appear in.
