"So when are we going to abandon the Intel 4004 architecture used in
all the current offerings from Dell and Gateway?"
Funny, but false. Pentiums won't even run 8085 code. They will still
run most 8086 native code, but software has finally caught up - most
programmers no longer concern themselves with segments and offsets.
"MP3 would work fine on a 60Mhz dragonball."
Not with the full filters.
"There is the inconvienient problem with physics. Power consumption is
proportional to the SQUARE of the clock rate."
That is completely false, at least with regards to microprocessors. The
problem is at the other end. That is why we moved from 5V to 3.3V
instead of up to 7V.
"Put another way, why would we need another crippled version of
Windows?"
You don't, but people obviously want connectivity. Good throughput over
narrow pipes requires a lot of horsepower. Watch a Palm VII pause
chunking on 1-2K of 5 bit encoded data. True, you could put dedicated
chips around the core, but that would effect size, power consumption,
and cost.
-jjf
--
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see
http://www.palm.com/devzone/mailinglists.html
