Monday, May 6, 2002
Are Pocket PCs Starving?
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 03:16 PM
http://www.cewindows.net/faqs/pocketpcstaving.htm
Chris De Herrera has written a column on Pocket PC data speeds. It's an interesting topic since as we move into the realm of 400 mhz CPUs, can the other components on the Pocket PC keep up? I've always found it rather surprising that for a RAM-based computer, Pocket PCs are pretty slow.
"The bus width in combination with the bus speed has a dramatic effect on the performance of computers. The bus width defines how many bits or bytes of data that can be read from the ram of the computer into the processor. The bus speed defines how fast the data can be read from the ram to into the processor. So think of the bus width as the number of lanes on a highway and the bus speed as the speed limit. Right now the StrongARM and XScale CPUs use a 100 mhz bus speed. Also the designs of the Pocket PC that are currently available use a 16 bit bus. This means that the maximum bus speed is 200 megabytes per second."
I'd be interested in hearing some of you highly-technical users chime in with your own opinions. What hardware elements need to be improved in order for us to see radical speed improvements? I personally think the video sub-systems are dragging things down - without any true hardware acceleration, the CPU has to do a lot of heavy lifting. Just wait until that ATI mobile chip arrives in a Pocket PC...
Chris De Herrera has written a column on Pocket PC data speeds. It's an interesting topic since as we move into the realm of 400 mhz CPUs, can the other components on the Pocket PC keep up? I've always found it rather surprising that for a RAM-based computer, Pocket PCs are pretty slow.
"The bus width in combination with the bus speed has a dramatic effect on the performance of computers. The bus width defines how many bits or bytes of data that can be read from the ram of the computer into the processor. The bus speed defines how fast the data can be read from the ram to into the processor. So think of the bus width as the number of lanes on a highway and the bus speed as the speed limit. Right now the StrongARM and XScale CPUs use a 100 mhz bus speed. Also the designs of the Pocket PC that are currently available use a 16 bit bus. This means that the maximum bus speed is 200 megabytes per second."
I'd be interested in hearing some of you highly-technical users chime in with your own opinions. What hardware elements need to be improved in order for us to see radical speed improvements? I personally think the video sub-systems are dragging things down - without any true hardware acceleration, the CPU has to do a lot of heavy lifting. Just wait until that ATI mobile chip arrives in a Pocket PC...
