BlackBerrys are getting a facelift, internally, with RIM's next generation of the device. The ARM9 processor has been the central component of a BlackBerry for a number of years now, but now has been ditched in favor of Intel's Xscale PXA9xx series, CPUs specifically designed for embedded environments. BlackBerrys are moving out of the niche market and into general consumer life, to a degree, and RIM wants to reflect that shift.
"One of the challenges for us at RIM is that our customers are asking for more computing power, and as the customer base started to expand, we needed a platform that could handle that,"
This is one step on the road Intel said they would be taking to produce mobile CPUs that consumed a fraction of the power they do today, and it is a perfect way to show it off.