Hey ars, Qualcomm's Scorpion is not a Cortex A8 processor

The tech blog arstechnica.com gets a lot of stuff technically right. But as they do in their latest post, Google at the crossroads: a review of the Nexus One, they often incorrectly refer to Qualcomm's Scorpion CPU as a "Cortex A8".

With a 1GHz Snapdragon (ARM Cortex A8) processor, it should have enough power to get through nearly any task that a mobile user might throw at it.

Scorpion is not a Cortex A8. Cortex A8 refers to ARM Holdings Inc's implementation of their ARMv7-A cpu architecture. As one of handful of companies holding an ARM architectural license, Qualcomm has built its own "clean sheet" implementation of the ARMV7-A architecture. That means it is instruction set compatible - but not that it is a copy of the Cortex A8.

A fair review none-the-less! Go Snapdragon!