> On the one hand XScale _is_ ARM. 
> On the other hand, Palm seems to be using some slower ARM chips ?
> On the gripping hand I have seen a Linux Zaurus with Squeak yesterday, and
> it seemes fast enough  to do everything but play croquet.
Ah, I somewhat missed the pun the first time around...

XScale is an interesting variant of the ARM family, though it does seem
to have some interesting issues with performance at the moment. There is
a new Acorn RISC OS machine coming out soon with a 600MHz XScale which
should be quite nice if they have suitably tweaked the cache usage.
Alternatively, Samsung are about to start sampling a 1.2GHz ARM10 cpu,
supposedly complete with the vector-float co-proc. Should be very nice.
Palm are using a TI device called OMAP which is based around the older
ARM7 core (an architecture v4t mcu I think) which is much, much slower
but much easier for them to integrate into a tiny cheap device. The same
chip is used in about a trillion digital cameras, cellphones, fax
machines, mp3 players, whatever. The new Zaurus uses the cheapo XScale
family member the PXA250 (which runs at 400MHz, go figure intel's naming
conventions) same as the latest iPaqs. Ought to be pretty fast,
apparently the iPAqs are dissapointing becasue of a failure by M$ to
handle the new caching regime (not my conclusion, taken from some
website or other).

Personally I want one of the Samsung devices.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
..... REALITY.SYS Corrupted - Unable to recover Universe