HP endorses StrongARM and ARM

HP's newest PDA will include a StrongARM 1100 running at 190Mhz and a StrongARM 1101 chipset. Interestingly, the chipset and the CPU come to a total cost of $51, similar to the price of an x86 combination. This shows that StrongARM can compete on performance/power consumption and not just price, despite its percieved disadvantage of not running x86 software. HP has also licensed the ARM 7 core directly from ARM suggesting that it will develop its own ARM variants. All this is good news for Corel and Acorn RISC PCs, and a possible indication that x86 may not spearhead the lowcost appliance market. Indeed, Jim Pick's speculation appears a plausible scenario, with the exception that Microsoft has another trick up its sleeve: embedded NT.