[Robotbeat]

Originally Posted by tj21

I think its great to see the PPC camp focused on creating affordable low-end devices but it would be nice to see some renewed innovation at the high-end as well. Stop trying to only fight Palm's strengths and go back to building on your own strengths.

TJ

As a long-time PPC enthusiast, I couldn't agree more with this statement. I want a good, fast processor. I'd rather have 200 MHz SDRam and a 400 MHz StrongARM processor for $200 more than a $300 or $200 PPC. I mean, the biggest difference between the two would be the increase in price and increase in power required (which can be offset by a twice as powerful battery). I mean, you pay about the same amount for other components not relating to the chipset and memory and cpu. The R&D costs would be quite minimal. You wouldn't need to design a new CPU. You'd just need to convert the process to maybe .18 from .21 in order to get the decrease in heat and increase in speed. Maybe I'm simplifying things, but why can't the instruction set stay the same and the chip become MORE efficient (or at least stay the same!) when you increase the clockspeed? That's what AMD does. I hope AMD comes into the PPC marketplace (another discussion, but do you guys think that AMD will become more powerful than ever before after the Hammer comes in full force, or do you think it will stay about the same as before?) in the next couple years, which is a definite possibility (well, in the non-PPC WinCE market, anyways, with their aquisition of Alchemy and their fast MIPS processor that, about two years ago, was once considered a rival for XScale for use in PPCs). Hopefully they will eventually do StrongARM-compatible chips.

In other words, why can't real innovation and improvement take place? Even a very linear improvement like fsb speed or RAM speed (maybe low-power DDR?) or, I hope, CPU speed would be so nice. And pretty easy, too. The problem is that, like TJ said, OEMs and MS and others are trying to work on a device that is super-low-power and very low priced and extremely small. That is why XScale sucks. Intel knows very well how to be able to easily scale up the CPU speed by making the pipelines less efficient (whence the bad per-clock performance of early P4 chips compared to PIII chips). They also managed to reduce the power, probably also due to the smaller process size (I'm not sure, does XScale use a finer manufacturing process compared to StrongARM? i.e. .18 instead of .21?). I don't really care about clock speed so much. I want greater performance. If you can give me a consistantly greater performance over all applications, with support for the same old apps, then I'm happy. I don't care too much about if it costs $200 extra, I want faster RAM and CPU speed. And I want to be able to see the results.

[Robotbeat]

Originally Posted by tj21

I think its great to see the PPC camp focused on creating affordable low-end devices but it would be nice to see some renewed innovation at the high-end as well. Stop trying to only fight Palm's strengths and go back to building on your own strengths.

TJ

As a long-time PPC enthusiast, I couldn't agree more with this statement. I want a good, fast processor. I'd rather have 200 MHz SDRam and a 400 MHz StrongARM processor for $200 more than a $300 or $200 PPC. I mean, the biggest difference between the two would be the increase in price and increase in power required (which can be offset by a twice as powerful battery). I mean, you pay about the same amount for other components not relating to the chipset and memory and cpu. The R&D costs would be quite minimal. You wouldn't need to design a new CPU. You'd just need to convert the process to maybe .18 from .21 in order to get the decrease in heat and increase in speed. Maybe I'm simplifying things, but why can't the instruction set stay the same and the chip become MORE efficient (or at least stay the same!) when you increase the clockspeed? That's what AMD does. I hope AMD comes into the PPC marketplace (another discussion, but do you guys think that AMD will become more powerful than ever before after the Hammer comes in full force, or do you think it will stay about the same as before?) in the next couple years, which is a definite possibility (well, in the non-PPC WinCE market, anyways, with their aquisition of Alchemy and their fast MIPS processor that, about two years ago, was once considered a rival for XScale for use in PPCs). Hopefully they will eventually do StrongARM-compatible chips.

In other words, why can't real innovation and improvement take place? Even a very linear improvement like fsb speed or RAM speed (maybe low-power DDR?) or, I hope, CPU speed would be so nice. And pretty easy, too. The problem is that, like TJ said, OEMs and MS and others are trying to work on a device that is super-low-power and very low priced and extremely small. That is why XScale sucks. Intel knows very well how to be able to easily scale up the CPU speed by making the pipelines less efficient (whence the bad per-clock performance of early P4 chips compared to PIII chips). They also managed to reduce the power, probably also due to the smaller process size (I'm not sure, does XScale use a finer manufacturing process compared to StrongARM? i.e. .18 instead of .21?). I don't really care about clock speed so much. I want greater performance. If you can give me a consistantly greater performance over all applications, with support for the same old apps, then I'm happy. I don't care too much about if it costs $200 extra, I want faster RAM and CPU speed. And I want to be able to see the results.

[yb]

I had an opportunity to view the 54xx presentation from our HP rep in Chicago. The price mentioned in the presentation was $749...I asked them how they expect to seel units in any volume at that price considering all the new competition emerging in the PPC space...They avoided the question...typical sales guys...yb

[Ed Hansberry]

Originally Posted by yb

I had an opportunity to view the 54xx presentation from our HP rep in Chicago. The price mentioned in the presentation was $749...I asked them how they expect to seel units in any volume at that price considering all the new competition emerging in the PPC space...They avoided the question...typical sales guys...yb

That could be one with the biometrics and GSM/GPRS. Kind of steep. If it is one of the bluetooth/wifi models or missing the biometrics, they can forget it.