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Technology Stocks : PALM - The rebirth of Palm Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: P.M.Freedman who wrote (1303)	8/23/2000 9:49:40 PM
From: mr.mark	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 6784

"Intel officials would not confirm the design win, and Palm officials would not elaborate on Yankowski's earlier comments" and... "While an Intel spokesman would not confirm the Palm design win, officials said the XScale is being designed into a number of next-generation handhelds." can anyone elaborate on the use of the term 'design win'?

To: P.M.Freedman who wrote (1303)	8/23/2000 11:15:41 PM
From: TechieGuy-alt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6784

Intel's XScale should offer a significant boost to future generations of Palm devices This is an interesting top. A friend of mine and I were discussing this. Palm obviously needs a new processor (the dragonball is too old tech to hack it for the next 10 years). But what do you do about the umpteen (>6000) apps already out there and the thousands already in the pipeline? They are designed (nay- compiled) to run on the dragonball. Any new design (say strong arm based) will most probably be a different architecture (read: instruction set). The same problem of trying to run windows apps on a mac. Should Palm give up one of the most significant aspect of its platform- the installed base of apps out there? One possible solution is that the old chip is quite slow. A new Strond arm based solution could emulate the instruction set of the Dragonball processor, thus preserving binary compatability. Another possibility is a dragonball coprocessor based solution where the old apps are detected and passed onto the dragonball for execution and the new ones are handled by the new processor. After a few years, they just stop including the co-processor in new models or charge extra for it. Interesting eh? TG

To: P.M.Freedman who wrote (1303)	8/24/2000 4:09:08 AM
From: lkj	Respond to of 6784

Analysts agree that Intel's flavor of the ARM design is the only powerful enough to offer Palm a meaningful improvement on the Motorola Dragonball chips it uses today. The above statement is completely wrong. The current Dragonball is a 16 bit processor running at 16 and 20 Mhz. Even Synthesizable ARM cores will run circles around the Dragonball in 32 bit format. Yes, Motorola is upgrading the Dragonball to 32 bit, but I don't see it get close to the speeds of various ARM processors. Intel's latest strongARM is fabbed on a 0.18 process, scheduled to run at around 1GHz, so much power that the Palm won't even know what to do with it. On the other Hand, Qualcomm is coming up with some nice chips that Palm can use. These are CDMA solutions with dual ARM cores; one dedicated for PDA function. Palm can surely get very innovative with these chips. (We know that Handspring is trying to play with them.) Khan