>  An XScale based PocketPC is coming out in a few weeks from
>Toshiba.  I would assume that XScale at 400MHz (max) is
>faster than 300MHz Geode:-)

Well, that depends....  If you mean the PXA210, then I would say that the 300 MHz Geode definitely beats the 400 MHz XScale.  The Geode is essentially a Pentium class CPU with floating point and MMX.  I'd say that it is probably still faster than even a 400 MHz PXA250, especially for running Squeak.

Squeak likes hardware floating point.  Compare Squeak on a 200 MHz Celeron against Squeak on an iPaq.  I know for sure that Squeak is much more responsive and the benchmarks are better on my old Pentium 133 Sharp Widenote that on my Casiopeia E-105 (a 131 MHz MIPS 3 CPU with no floating point hardware).

I don't think Squeak would readily take advantage of the dual multiply-accumulate pipelines or SIMD on the PXA250, just like it doesn't really benefit from MMX.

Actually, WinCE can be built for x86 machines, and that would solve the instant on problem, so I would probably still favor the Geode machine for a portable, even though I am awfully fond of the ARM CPU.  Now a PocketPC base on a 400 MHz XScale CPU that has hardware floating point (no such version of the XScale exists yet, that I'm aware of) would really be something.

						-Dean