On Wednesday 15 May 2002 16:22, Kevin Fisher wrote:
> Just out of curiosity...I've never had any experience with Crusoe
> chips before.  I notice the OQO has a 1Ghz CPU...and I understand
> this has no floating point either.  However, at that clock speed, how
> do you think emulation would perform?  Undoubtadly Squeak (or Ogg
> Vorbis decoding :) would be faster, but would it be MUCH faster?

The Crusoe actually has floating point hardware optimized for x86 
compatibility. See the block diagrams in

  http://www.sandpile.org/impl/crusoe.htm

> (I too await a PDA with a floating point unit of some sort...floating
> point, and lots of RAM....or, an iPod with Vorbis support...)

How about the 4 inch screens on these new devices? Too large? Too small?

> On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 01:07:12PM -0700, Tim Rowledge wrote:
> > XScale is very unlilkely to get FP hardware; after all it would
> > then compete very clearly with x86 devices.
> >
> > However, ARM10 devices do had fp - in fact array FP - hardware. An
> > 800MHz ARM1020FE based machine would be very nice to have.
> > Supposedly Lucent has produced sample units, but I haven't heard of
> > anyone shipping yet.

It would take a lot of effort to make Squeak take advantage of this 
hardware. Unless you just wanted to speed up selected parts, like 
balloon3D. The result of a more general implementation would be worth 
it, in my opinion.

> > PS Oh yes, ARM11 is already on the way.

How about the Jazelle bytecode accelerator which will be standard (I 
think) on ARM11 (http://www.arm.com/armtech/jazelle?OpenDocument) ?
Would that help Squeak?

-- Jecel