At 2:43 PM -0800 3/2/99, Richard Hartman wrote:
>Couldn't some of that increase be due to
>the new processor? Isn't running at twice
>the clock speed of the older one?
The Palm V and Palm IIIx run the "new" (EZ) processor at the same speed the
"old" dragonball -- 16Mhz.
The new devices are faster because of a bunch of optimizations in the newer
OS and fewer wait states when accessing memory.
It turns out that overall performance is almost entirely bound by the time
it takes to fetch instructions and data out of memory. That is, in the
current architecture the bus is constantly busy. So if you want to go
faster, in general you have to either use fewer instructions or read &
write less memory.
Put another way, a faster clock won't help much unless you can also speed
up the bus, which means speeding up memory. So don't try overclocking the
CPU. :)
--Bob
