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

To: David E. Taylor who wrote (1497)	8/31/2000 4:18:36 PM
From: Allen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6784

(1) Software emulation would slow things down, though maybe not enough to be noticeable; When Apple moved the Macintosh from the 68K family to the PowerPC family of processors they maintained backward compatibility by emulating the 68K. The increase in processing power of the PowerPC was such that the emulation hit wasn't really noticeable, at least, until you got the PowerPC native version of the application. I actually have a Windows 98 emulator on my Macintosh and while it's no 500MHz Pentium III (or whatever the Intel name du jour is) it provides reasonable response. I suspect Palm could manage such a transition as well as Apple did if they wanted to. On the other hand it might make more sense to go to "portable", interpreted environment like Java.

To: David E. Taylor who wrote (1497)	8/31/2000 4:25:57 PM
From: TechieGuy-alt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to 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