Pepper tablet getting cheaper

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Thu Apr 20 17:34:42 UTC 2006


On 20-Apr-06, at 10:21 AM, Brad Fuller wrote:

> tim Rowledge wrote:
>> People interested in a tablet device to run Squeak on might want to
>> look at the pepperpad; it's a lunix based, XScale powered tablet with
>> quite a bit of interesting stuff built in and it's now available for
>> 'only' $650 via
>>
>> http://dealnews.com/deals/Pepper-Pad-Portable-Entertainment-Device- 
>> for-650-shipped-after-rebate/116547.html
>
> very interesting. Do you have one?

Nope; it's a bunch of money that I'd be much more willing to spend on  
a WoodRat (http://www.woodrat.com/) since I simply don't need a  
portable device much anymore but do need some help with producing  
dovetails efficiently for my other business. A Newton was great when  
I was a department manager but since I stopped banging my head  
against that particular spiked wall life has been much simpler.

> Anyone use one? I'm wondering if it
> is underpowered.
> Specs:
> http://www.pepper.com/products/specifications.html
A 624MHz XScale 270 is roughly equivalent to my RISC OS machine and  
it certainly won't be a blazingly fast system; Morphic sucks up  
cycles like you wouldn't believe and Smalltalk thrashes caches to  
dashes. The ol'RISC OS machine gets 32m bytecodes/sec and 1.2m sends/ 
sec and about 25 Dorado in the full greenbook benchmarks so it really  
*should* seem very fast.

It's unlikely it would make a good Croquet machine without a serious  
graphics card (which it doesn't have) but it would have been a lovely  
thing to run the exobox system on and it is quite close to what we  
wanted at Interval. It's just possible it would work as a portable  
Sophie device, but Tweak is not exactly showing itself to be amore  
efficient Morphic.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: FSE: Fake Serious Error





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