The Compact Flash Association (CFA), the standards body behind the Compact Flash memory technology earlier in the year finally completed work on approving the Compact Flash version 3.0 specification.

The updated specification adds enchantments to the Compact Flash (CF) system bus architecture significantly. The two most significant of the changes are that the new model for future CF cards provides a data transfer rate of 66MB/second. This is a significant and much welcomed improvement over that of the version 1 and 2 specification, who's maximum guideline transfer rate is only 16MB/second - offering more than a 4 scale increase.
Equally important is that the specification now at least formally recognises and supports the use of Ultra Direct Memory Access (UDMA), effectively allowing data traffic to skim around the processor and go directly into and out of system memory. For the layman, this provides a vastly significant performance improvement when accessing CF resources.

While this advancement will mean great things for future PDA devices, and it is worth noting that the specification is fully backwards compatibly with all older models. When putting it into perspective, the 2.0 specification was only finalised in June 2003, proving that frequent bureaucracy in standards groups can mean little when manufacturers, under their own initiative demonstrate faster CF variants long before CFA were ready to rubber stamp their own offering.

View: Compact Flash Association