[Bob Russell]

Hmm...
http://www.intel.com/design/pca/appl...7x_faq.htm#new

The Intel® PXA27x family processor includes the Intel® PXA270, PXA271, and PXA272 processors.

Designed from the ground-up for wireless clients and incorporating the latest Intel mobile technologies, the Intel® PXA27x processor family redefines what a wireless handheld can do. Intel PXA27x processors are the first Intel XScale® technology-based processors to include Intel® Wireless MMX™ technology for high-performance media acceleration. Intel® Quick Capture technology provides one of the industry's most flexible and powerful camera interfaces for digital images and video. And while processor performance scales from 104 MHz up to a commanding 624 MHz, power consumption is also critical. Wireless Intel SpeedStep® technology is a quantum leap forward in low-power operation. Finally, the Intel PXA27x processor is designed to make network transactions safer while helping to manage data security.

Intel® PXA270 processor: 312/416/520/624 MHz applications processor, standalone discrete solution, 32 bit processor with 32 bit external memory bus

Intel® PXA271 processor: 312/416 MHz applications processor stacked with a 256Mb Intel StrataFlash® Wireless Memory and a 256 Mb Low Power SDRAM — 32 bit processor with 16 bit internal and 32 bit external memory bus

Intel® PXA272 processor: 312/416/520 MHz applications processor, with 2 pc 256 Mb of Intel StrataFlash® Wireless Memory — 32 bit processor with 32 bit internal and external memory bus

Some info from Wikipedia

PXA27x

The PXA27x family (code-named Bulverde) consists of the PXA270 and PXA271-PXA272 processors. This revision is a huge update to the XScale family of processors. The PXA270 is clocked in four different speeds: 312 MHz, 416 MHz, 520 MHz and 624 MHz and is a stand-alone processor with no packaged memory. The PXA271 can be clocked to 312 MHz or 416 MHz and has 32 MiB of 16-bit stacked StrataFlash memory and 32 MiB of 16-bit SDRAM in the same package. The PXA272 can be clocked to 312 MHz, 416 MHz or 520 MHz and has 64 MiB of 32-bit stacked StrataFlash memory.

Intel also added many new technologies to the PXA27x family such as:

* Wireless SpeedStep: the operating system can clock the processor down based on load to save power.
* Wireless MMX: 43 new SIMD instructions containing the full MMX instruction set and the integer instructions from Intel's SSE instruction set along with some instructions unique to the XScale. Wireless MMX provides 16 extra 64-bit registers that can be treated as an array of two 32-bit words, four 16-bit halfwords or eight 8-bit bytes. The XScale core can then perform up to eight adds or four MACs in parallel in a single cycle. This capability is used to boost speed in decoding and encoding of multimedia and in playing games.
* Additional peripherals, such as an USB-Host interface and a camera interface.
* Internal 256 KiB SRAM to reduce power consumption and latency.

The PXA27x family was released in April 2004. Along with the PXA27x family Intel released the 2700G embedded graphics co-processor.

In August 2005 Intel announced the successor to Bulverde code named Monahans. They demoed it showing its capability to play back high definition encoded video on a PDA screen. The new processor was shown clocked at 1.25 GHz but Intel said it only offered a 25% increase in performance (800 MIPS for the 624 MHz PXA270 processor vs 1000 MIPS for 1.25 GHz Monahans). An announced successor to the 2700G graphics processor, code named Stanwood, has since been cancelled. Some of the features of Stanwood are integrated into Monahans. For extra graphics capabilities, Intel recommends third party chips like the Nvidia GoForce chip family.

Note: The article is under review primarily because of credit for the chips, but note that there is someone that has also questioned completeness. However the family description seems complete based on what I saw on the Intel page. According to this site from April 2004, there is another one, the PXA273.

Today Intel announced the PXA270, PXA271, PXA272, and PXA273—the latest members of its PXA2xx family of application processors.

And did you notice that there seems to be support for USB hosting! How great would that be to have your pda as a usb host, even for external usb storage if nothing else!

So it does seem like they are in the same family, but the 700p might be upgraded to use the PXA271 or PXA272 even at the same clock speed, and could provide zippier results. I didn't go so far as to compare all the features to try to see what other features might help if the processor is an upgrade, but at least it seems feasible to get an improvement and still stay in the PXA27x processor family.

Aha!!!!... this article showing the Treo 700w uses a "Intel XScale PXA 272 312 MHz processor" would seem to be confirmation of the upgrade coming for the 700p. People may just not notice the zippiness on the 700w with the Win Mobile overhead, and no previous Treo to compare with.