XScale is a new chip family made by Intel based on the ARM architecture.  This new family offers some significant benefits for embedded systems including robotics.  One distinct advantage of the chip is the ability to speed-step which means you can vary the speed of the processor clock on the fly.  This, coupled with advanced chip technology allows for remarkably low power consumption while enabling high-performance computing. 

The XScale chip has been used in several embedded applications and Acroname is providing a version of the tool chain and pre-built versions of software that run on the XScale family. 

The inital platform for testing and developing the tool chain is the Stayton board.  This board has roots in a network appliance and offers a great platform for booting Linux in an XScale environment.  The Stayton also offers 2 PCMCIA slots, two USB ports, and a serial port. 

Here is an initial Stayton development board.

We now carry the Stargate board which is a very stable and improved version of the Stayton development board.  We offer this processor as an on-board processing option in our Garcia Robot.