ARM Ltd. has launched a new processor at its Developers' Conference in California. With clock speeds ranging between 600MHz and 1GHz, the Cortex A8 will not only be far more powerful than existing ARM designs, it will also include extensions to accelerate multimedia codecs such as MPEG4 and MP3 - and floating point arithmetic. The BBC reports that the new processors should be capable of over 1,000 Dhrystone Mip (DMip); today's ARM 9 chips peak at just 300 DMip.

ARM is targetting the Cortex A8 family at high end multimedia phones, set-top boxes, handheld games consoles and even cars. Perhaps some of those devices could run RISC OS?

Links:
Press release
Cortex A8. Apparently all those words mean something.
BBC news