From: Dean Swan@MITEL on 05/01/2000 10:48 AM
John,
I too have been seriously considering "upgrading" my E-105 to one of the new Compag PocketPCs. Can Andreas build an ARM version of the WinCE VM?
On a related note, the ARM based version of Nintendo's Gameboy is apparently being delayed until 2001 because they don't want to cannibalize current strong sales of Gameboy Color. However, developers kits *are* shipping. If you/Disney is able to get a hold of a developer's kit, I'd be happy to do the port.
Regarding Squeak on on lower performance processors, has anybody done any serious performance profiling on low end machines? I've run Squeak 2.7 acceptably on a 485DX2/50 Mhz, which is a fairly low end machine, and after my recent read of that 'history of PARC' book, I did a little digging on the Alto.
From what I gather, it was a user micro-codable NOVA clone with a 1.5
microsecond instruction cycle time, and 170 ns micro cycle. It must have run Smalltalk bytecode at something like only 10,000, to 20,000 bytecodes/second, and maybe 1000 to 2000 sends/second which is less than 1% of the speed of Squeak on "modern" hardware!
This makes me wonder how Smalltalk never suffered from infant mortality. I suspect that Squeak in it's current incarnation is just squandering resources in a few isolated areas, since Smalltalk did, in fact, survive from it's origins on what would be considered *very* low-end hardware by today's standards.
-Dean
dean_swan@mitel.com
John.Maloney@disney.com on 05/01/2000 09:37:55 AM
Please respond to squeak@cs.uiuc.edu
To: squeak@cs.uiuc.edu cc: (bcc: Dean Swan/Ogd/Mitel)
Subject: Re: Palm drops 68K in Favor of ARM - Implications for Squeak?
Thanks for passing along this news.
The Palm has long been a natural Squeak target, but the low performance Dragonball processor made it unattractive. Worse, the Palm OS memory model made it difficult to get a single contiguous block of RAM in which to put Squeak's object heap. An ARM processor (StrongARM or otherwise) would address the first problem and I suspect that Palm would also address the second problem when they migrate to the new processor. Applications such as MP3 players and speech recognition would be difficult to write using the current Palm memory model, and I don't think ARM architecture offers any particular incentives to use small memory chunks the way the 68K architecture does.
Meanwhile, the new Compaq Aero based on the StrongARM sounds like it might make an excellent Squeak platform. There are pdf files at:
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/handhelds/pocketpc.pdf ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/handhelds/famchart.pdf
-- John
At 12:58 PM -0700 4/28/00, John-Reed Maffeo wrote: