Friday, October 18, 2002
Windows Media Player 8.5 and Xscale
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 11:58 AM
There have been a lot of questions around whether or not WMP 8.5 that comes with EUU3 is optimized for the Xscale processor. The answer is no. I received the following information from a Microsoft Windows Media Player Program Manager:
"One of the key features of Windows Media Player 8.5 for Pocket PC was overall performance improvements which are across the board no matter what processor you are running. These performance improvements are not XScale (in particular Cotulla) specific."
So there you have it. Probably not what you wanted to hear, but I'm happy to have performance enhancements that improve my experience on the StrongARM-based XDA. And until you Xscale owners try this player and see what these performance improvements do for you, it's too early to cry foul. :)
Derek Brown made the following statement regarding this issue in a Brighthand thread:
"We made a decision several years ago to move away from supporting several processor architectures and target a single core. We believe this ultimately benefited our OEMs, developers and customers by unifying our platform around a single processor architecture -- ARM V4.
The PXA250 utilizes the ARM V5 instruction set with backwards compatibility for ARM V4. When we completed the Pocket PC 2002 software in June 2002, we optimized for the most broadly compatible processor core available at the time (ARM V4), which it still remains today. Choosing to support one processor core ensures we don’t fragment our platform for developers and cause extra work for our ISVs to optimize their applications each time a new processor technology is released.
By staying with an ARM V4 architecture we assure longer life for our customers existing hardware – for instance if we were to move to an ARM V5 architecture we would have to obsolete the all SA1110 iPAQ devices.
Microsoft considers mobile devices a strategic business. We are committed to working closely with Intel and other silicon vendors on delivering future versions of our Pocket PC and Smartphone devices. We have released specific software modifications to our OEMs that in total are all of the optimizations we believe are possible to maximize PXA250 performance (without causing incompatibilities for our OEMs and developers).
So the answer to your question is no unless it could meet the broader requirements listed above.
Derek Brown"
"One of the key features of Windows Media Player 8.5 for Pocket PC was overall performance improvements which are across the board no matter what processor you are running. These performance improvements are not XScale (in particular Cotulla) specific."
So there you have it. Probably not what you wanted to hear, but I'm happy to have performance enhancements that improve my experience on the StrongARM-based XDA. And until you Xscale owners try this player and see what these performance improvements do for you, it's too early to cry foul. :)
Derek Brown made the following statement regarding this issue in a Brighthand thread:
"We made a decision several years ago to move away from supporting several processor architectures and target a single core. We believe this ultimately benefited our OEMs, developers and customers by unifying our platform around a single processor architecture -- ARM V4.
The PXA250 utilizes the ARM V5 instruction set with backwards compatibility for ARM V4. When we completed the Pocket PC 2002 software in June 2002, we optimized for the most broadly compatible processor core available at the time (ARM V4), which it still remains today. Choosing to support one processor core ensures we don’t fragment our platform for developers and cause extra work for our ISVs to optimize their applications each time a new processor technology is released.
By staying with an ARM V4 architecture we assure longer life for our customers existing hardware – for instance if we were to move to an ARM V5 architecture we would have to obsolete the all SA1110 iPAQ devices.
Microsoft considers mobile devices a strategic business. We are committed to working closely with Intel and other silicon vendors on delivering future versions of our Pocket PC and Smartphone devices. We have released specific software modifications to our OEMs that in total are all of the optimizations we believe are possible to maximize PXA250 performance (without causing incompatibilities for our OEMs and developers).
So the answer to your question is no unless it could meet the broader requirements listed above.
Derek Brown"
