[Gllug] Sharp Zaurus

[Richard Cohen]

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...

Cheers
Richard

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