The answer to this question is not in forum, but in a good book on computer architecture. I recommend books by Hennessy and Patterson. A quick and dirty answer might go something like this:
The MC68000 CPU (used in the Pilot 1000 thru Palm m515) uses a 2-level microprogrammed internal architecture which takes several clock cycles to fetch and execute even a single simple instruction. Whereas, the Pentium 4 has gazillions of transistors to branch predict, fetch, crack, schedule and execute in a pipeline many instructions per cycle from more local cache than a Pilot 5000 had in total memory. The downside is that the P4 also consumes well in excess of 1000 times more power. The ARM CPU's used in the Tungsten T is a good compromise between these two (short pipeline, small caches, but power efficient, etc.) Ron Nicholson HotPaw <http://www.hotpaw.com/rhn/hotpaw> -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
