At 7:13 PM +0200 25-04-00, Michael Sokolov wrote:
>I doubt that you will even have PRCs on any other processor. The very
>design of
>the PalmOS memory architecture is practically defined by the properties,
>peculiarities, and limitations of the 68000/Dragonball.
Other way around. The dragonball was chosen because it was the best chip
out there that met the unique needs of the Palm devices: low power, low RAM
overhead, embedded controllers, easy to program. ARM and even StrongARM
processers did exist when this decision was made, and were considered. Zen
of Palm says why pay for cycles you're never going to use?
>everything in PalmOS (chunks, records, resources, you name it) designed around
>the 64 KB limit?
16 bits is the natural word size. It takes almost twice as long (twice as
many joules) to load 32 bits into the processor. So if we use 16 bit
values everywhere, we double the battery life. (I know, not really, but
you get the jist.)
The handheld device market is EXTREMELY price sensitive. Look at cell
phones, pagers, video games, etc. Yeah, us nerds will pay the extra cash
for more horsepower, no problem. But in order to sell 10's or 100's of
millions of devices, you've got to keep cost of hardware in mind.
Processors cost more money. RAM costs more money. High capacity batteries
cost more money. High resolution screens cost more money. It takes a very
special kind of developer to realize that they don't need all that, and can
do really cool stuff without it. Maybe you're not one of those developers
-- that's OK, the world needs desktop programmers too.
Don't try to tell me that these issues of cost and power don't concern you
as a developer though. Notice that if you develop for Palm OS, you have
over 6 million potential customers. If you develop for WinCE, you have far
fewer. MS won't actually say how many - they lump all CE sales into the
same bucket, but we all know that the different CE flavors splinters that
market substantially--much more than the difference between a Palm III,
Palm V, Palm VII, Visor, etc. ...and how many of your potential customers
use EPOC?
--Bob
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