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Technology Stocks : PALM - The rebirth of Palm Inc.
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To: David E. Taylor who wrote (1497)8/31/2000 4:25:57 PM
From: TechieGuy-alt  Read Replies (2) of 6784
 

TG:

Thanks for the explanation. I would suppose that, if either of your two solutions were to be implemented:

(1) Software emulation would slow things down, though maybe not enough to be noticeable;


Not really. The dragon ball is a pretty old architecture. (Even) a 200Mhz StrongARM could easily emulate the dragon ball in less than 50% processor utilization (my guess).

The problem with emulation is that the emulator is a piece of code that is emulating hardware. It needs to be tested pretty throughly and that takes time (in addition to the time to write the emulator).

(2) A Dragonball co-processor would add to the cost, do we know how much?


This is the more interesting approach. Sort of "poor mans" approach to being backward hardware compatable.
A dragonball co processor would add about $30 to the cost of the unit (the processor itself is ~$7-$8, the rest for burden/real estate, memory etc. Maybe $20 if they can do it cheap).
This is the quicker solution, as the hardware is guaranteed to run all the apps out there by design.

Of course, real estate is very important in a handheld design, and must be looked at beyond just the $ cost of the PCB etc.

Another interesting design would be to colocate both the ARM and the Dragonball in a synth core. Though, this is now a non-standard solution and they may not be able to get volume benefits out of it.

TG
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