The article was vague enough that I don't think you can assume a currently
shipping ARM processor is going to be used in a Palm. It is possible ARM is
designing a chip from the ground up. Certainly Palm is turning enough
volume by now, that it would be profitable for someone to make a chip just
for them. If that is the case here would be my wish list of stuff:
1) I love the current memory protection scheme, but, if you could improve
the performance of DmWrite (and cousins) it would allow developers to take
greater advantage of the memory architecture.
2) The floating point performance is limited on the current 68K. While
people often say this is a specialized application, it is useful for both
scientific as well as consumer applications, (such as wireless and
compression).
3) Getting protection for OS globals so people like me don't accidently
stomp them.
4) Allowing globals in shared libraries (I know you can sort of do this
right now but you can't handle the case of the compiler generated globals).
5) Keep the power consumption low.
I know some of these functions belong more to the OS than the
microprocessor, but for efficient implementation the OS usually "bends" to
the architecture of the hardware. I would be interested in hearing what
are on other peoples wish lists.
Oliver
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