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

To: Allen who wrote (1503)	9/1/2000 2:35:38 PM
From: Daniel	Respond to of 6784

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 pocessing power of the PowerPC was such that the emulation hit wasn't really noticeable... I suspect Palm could manage such a transition as well as Apple did if they wanted to. Another thing to consider is power consumption. A desktop machine doesn't have a tight power budget, so there's not usually a problem using a fast, but also power-hungry, new chip. For handhelds (and other portables), power consumption is an important consideration. I assume Palm currently uses a processor tens of times slower than those in desktop machines to save power and provide reasonable battery life. That issue might prevent jumping to a processor that is fast enough to emulate an old processor at that old processor's usual speed. (But, of course, manufacturers are always working on reducing power to enable use in portable applications.) Daniel