[Gllug] Sharp Zaurus

[Alain Williams]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 11:59:30AM +0100, Richard Cohen wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Alain Williams wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 11:23:26AM +0100, Walid Shaari wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 11:06, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > > > After some badgering by certain lurkers on this list (they know who
> > > > they are :-) I'm looking to buy a Sharp Zaurus in town today. Any
> > > > idea where to find the best deal for this, and how much I should pay?
> > >
> > > £229 from Micro Anvika in TC if you are looking for the 5500, if you
> > > want to wait until mid-april when the 5600 is released her in UK, prices
> > > might drop then again/ stocks vanish :).
> >
> > Hmmm, I was looking at these things. AFIR the 5600 uses an intel processor
> > instead of ARM. Does anyone have comments comparing these 2 - battery life
> > would seem to be an important criterion.
> 
> It does have an Intel chip, but it's also an ARM chip :-)
> 
> ARM are not chip manufacturers - they design cores, which are then licensed
> by device manufacturers and made by a few big companies with the expertise
> and fab capacity.  The previous generation of ARM was StrongARM, made by...
> Intel!  The current generation of ARM is XScale, made by... Intel!  There
> are also plenty of current devices using older versions of the ARM core -
> the Gameboy Advance (and the new model) is one of the highest-profile, as
> well, obviously, as a whole bunch of Symbian (and other) phones...
> 
> AFAIK, the battery profile of the XScale is broadly similar to the StrongARM
> - i.e. nothing like x86.  It does, however, have some design and/or
> implementation flaws in the earlier models which mean that the performance
> of a 400MHz XScale is nowhere near the performance of the 200MHz StrongARM
> and can, in fact, be slower... I don't know if there are devices shipping
> yet with the newer model XScale...  I think the PXA250 has the problem and
> the PXA255 fixes it, but I could well be wrong...

Since the processor in the SL-5600 is PXA250, it looks (from the point of view
of battery life) that it might be worth sticking with SL-5500.
I'll wait 'till someone else has bought a 5600 & see what is is like :-)

-- 
Alain Williams

#include <std_disclaimer.h>

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