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Palm Moving From Dragonball To ARM/StrongARM
mikefoley wrote to us with some interesting news from the
PalmPilot folks regarding chips. They'll be moving to Arm/SA as the title indicates, but the story also contains some cool information about their wireless plans. Looks like I'm going to need a new Palm soon.
More info about ARMs.
Current ARM powered products.
So, the StrongARM processor chalks up yet another adoptee. Ever since Acorn Computers spun off Advanced Risc Machines (ARM) as a separate company, ARM has made progressively more and more inroads into the embedded processor market. Today there are ARM chips almost everywhere I look, from ATM routing systems to palm-helds to the odd desktop PC or Net box running either RiscOS or ARMLinux. And this has been a fairly quiet revolution happening out of sight of the general public, who neither know nor care what sits inside that little black organiser. When there is so much noise happening in the desktop PC CPU market, this is an almost refreshing change.
Now - the real question is since there is a port of Linux on the StrongARM processor, how long will it be before we can attach a microdrive to this baby and run a pocket Linux machine?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
They're going to put voice recognition in all palms. I can't think of a worse idea. Isn't it bad enough that we can't go anywhere without having to endure listening to people yell into their cel phones to affirm their perverted self importance, or walk through an office without passing at least one fool listening to voicemail over speakerphone? Now we're going to have a whole new breed of idiots speaking loudly and s-l-o-w-l-y into their handhelds, repeating everything because the first try didn't work.
"FIND MOM'S PHONE NUMBER
...
no
...
FIND MMMOMMM'S PHONE NUMBER"
over and over again.
please help me
It seems like the Palm CEO is referring to Palm competitors when he says this, but if he is, it doesn't seem to make much sense, with the way about one-third of the Palm's supposed screen size is wasted with the silly silk-screen thingy.
The extra processing power is nice (I think the real reason behind it is a plan to catch up with the WinCE devices' multimedia capabilities), but that Voice Activation is not a good idea if it's anything like the current voice technologies. The last thing I need is to have a bunch of jokers activating my Palm willy-nilly, like the way everyone has fun screwing with the poor folks who bought The Clapper to control their lights and televisions.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
ARM is in WinCE, except for all the WinCE devices
that instead use the MIPS processor. Which is also in your Playstation (1 & 2) and N64. Between them MIPS and ARM have pretty much got the embedded market sewn up. Although maybe Transmeta will change things.
(yes I know the PS2 is not a pure MIPS design anymore but at the heart of the fabled emotion engine there is still a MIPS cpu core.)
ARM used to be owned/manufactured by DEC, but when they were bought by Compaq, the ARM division went to Intel. See Intel's product page on them here.
I don't think any MP3 modules exist... yet.
But since you brought up Handspring, I wonder what this means for their future devices? Because they use Palm OS, and future versions of Palm OS will run on different chips, will Handspring be forced to change chips to keep pace?
What if Palm managed to get a volume or other business deal with the new manufacturer, and Handspring can't produce their devices affordably anymore? Would handspring be forced to scramble to change their vision? "Sure PalmOS was good for starters, but now we're moving in a whole new direction!" or "All future handspring devices will be identical in function because we are unable to upgrade the operating system... but look forward to some funky new colors!"
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
One thing that doesn't seem to be addressed in the news item is binary compatibility. Palm has an enormous library of software that is compiled and matured on the Dragonball MCU. For the most part, this software is written in some form of C, so should be cross-compilable, but will require motivating anyone with closed source to recompile [in the very least].
Less obvious is how they are going to keep all of that straight. Hopefully they will[have] develop[ed] some kind of binary signing standard so that people who unwittingly download the Dragonball version don't install it on their ARM version [or vice versa]. I seriously doubt the two are that binary compatible... In some cases, the CPU may see that it has been handed an invalid opcode, and will branch out to a handler (if that has been implemented... that is a design subtlety that I know that I wouldn't normally worry about), but there are only so many opcodes, and there are bound to be overlap.
Anyway, the point being: trying to execute binary code for the wrong archetecture would probably have rather catastophic results. Does anyone know if there already exists a mechanism that could handle this in the Palm? I'm not aware of how application loading occurs on the platform.
Besides, I won't buy one until I can play FreeCell on it...
Alright, the decision to use an Arm processor is a good one, but has Palm really thought this all out? They'll have to port PalmOS to an entirely new architecture, and every program available for the Palm 1000 all the way up to the Palm VII will have to be recompiled. Also consider that many coders in the Palm world (especially the 'OS enhancement' people) code in assembler to get to the bare metal and achieve speed increases/bypass the operating system. Assembly language is not especially portable...
Am I worrying for naught? Is Palm going to announce some kind of 'binary compatibility' built into Arm versions of PalmOS? I *very* seriously doubt it; that would be to daunting a task. I personally don't want to have to track down all of the programs that I use on my Palm III if/when I buy a new Arm-based Palm. I wonder if they've considered all of the implications of this decisions...
Having a nice new, fast PalmXVI will be great, but will there be any applications for the beast? I can't see Palm developers dropping support for the huge installed base, and I also can't see them snubbing their noses at a product that might potentially change the way handeld computing/information management works. I guess only time will tell.
Low end ARM chips are cheaper.
http://www.ximuoi.com/ has an impressive mp3 player comming out for the palm sometime this year i think... It can work alone too! (and do many other things, gimme!;-)
---
It's easy to write EPOC off, as its share of the PDA market is still pretty small (although it's quite high in the UK), but its inclusion in smartphones from later on this year could well see it being widely-adopted at that end of the market, with consequent "sudden" demand for compatible PDAs...
Here is a pocket ARM Linux machine. No HD, but Flash, and a CompactFlash slot.
Sorry for the formatting:
Display
240x320, Bright Back-light, True Color TFT Iiquid
crystal, 65,536 color
CPU
206MHz ARM RISC 32bit Microprocessor
OS
ARMLinux
Interface Serial
RS232C & USB Serial port
Memory
32MB RAM, 32MB(64MB) Flash Memory
Built-In
Internet Web Browser & E-mail S/W with Mobile phone
or Wireless Modem
MP3 Player Function
MPEG Moving Picture Function
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
I really hope they don't kill Palm's great battery life when they start using 400 MHz processors. Then they would be sacrificing one of their major selling points -- for what? To become more like the MP3-playing PocketPC?
I really think that Palm currently has a good product that they should be building on rather than scrapping. Unless their new architecture is exceptionally wonderful, they risk losing market share, because they will be launching a new product that competes against their own firmly entrenched installed base.
Such is The Innovator's Dilemma -- long-term success may sometimes require pissing off one's current customers.
Considering that the DragonBall code base is written for a processor that runs at 50 Mhz, it should not be difficult to emulate it on a 200 Mhz processor. Probably the API won't change much, so a simple recompile will do for many apps.
Jilles
See, hopefully the voice interface will be optional, so it'll only be losers babbling at their PDAs, so it'll be easy to weed them out of the herd before they breed.
Seriously, though, there is for some bizarre reason a perception that voice-interface would be a good thing, so devices with it may sell better than devices without it. Unfortunately.
"I think we all know that the screen sizes suck, and that the drop-down menus are the road to hell," Yankowski said.
Yes, Palm (and WinCE) handhelds have really small screens. But, what's this deal about the pull-down menus? One of the reasons I like my Palm organizer so much is you don't have to worry about the pull-down menus because you rarely use them. And, with MenuHack or PalmOS 3.5, to pull down the menus you just tap the application tab at the top of the screen; what's so hard about that?
I had been thinking lately about how Palm was going to take that next hardware leap. As much as we all like it, let's face it: the DragonBall is a 20Mhz 16-bit processor in a world that is demanding 32-bit processors more and more. So, the StrongARM sounds like an OK choice. But, this new CEO dude sounds like he doesn't care about the famed "Zen of Palm." It sounds more like he's willing to sacrifice the simplicity and elegance of the Palm design to get a few lame options like "voice activation." If that happens, I think he'll find a lot of Palm faithful going somewhere else (or buying up old Palm units!), and those new users he's trying to attract buying PocketPCs.
My $0.02, of course.
--Mythos
There's no doubt in my mind that the ARM is a great chip for PalmOS. Having used Newtons from quite some time, I can attest they have both great battery life and excellent performance. Combined with reasonable color, this will extend the reach of the Palm line into many interesting application spaces, such as palmtop mapping.
I can forsee this getting a bit rocky, however.
Remember the last great CISC->RISC migration undertaken by a consumer device company: Apple's move from 68K to PowerPC. One of the things that really hurt Apple was their CISC->RISC migration was managed very poorly and in my opinion set back developer innovation on the Mac a good two years.
Palm's situation is different; it is unlikely they'll make the same mistakes Apple did; I'm just hoping they don't dream up new ones of their own.
The sooner a commodity hardware market for Linux PDAs exists, the sooner we can take control of our own destiny. Individual companies controlling platforms are just too untrustworthy.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What the real killer application for the next generation of wireless palm devices should be is wireless communication over about a 10-100m radius. This would allow the USER to own the base stations that the device communicates with - who is going to use wireless internet billed per KILObyte? Not me. Not a lot of people.
Make the palm have a wireless serial connector - like an RF serial port (Bluetooth, ahem, vapour, ahem), then all sorts of control applications will spring up. Applications to automagically download the weather and slashdot whenever you walk into a micro-service area. If the devices can talk to each other, you can synchronize schedules by walking by friends in the office. The applications are endless!
If palm doesn't do it, RIM or someone else will. People are in love with 100% connected internet, but that's missing the boat. Remember what made the palm great; It was cheap, and did what you expected it to.
The trick will be doing it without losing that V form factor.. my Palmpilot Professional looks obese next to the nice shiny new Palm Vx. The microsoft offerings are too fat to get into my pocket; I had a Newton Messagepad (Not the latter generation, though) and it had no-fit-in-pocket-itis.
Get us programmable wireless palm, with lots of $75 base stations, and you'll see applications pop up everywhere. If bluetooth would ever become available, I'd do this myself. :)
Kudos
..don't panic
You say that as if it'd be a good thing. [grin]
Really, try listening to the human-computer voice interfacing in Trek. It's screamingly unrealistic. Which makes sense, because they weren't going for realism, they were going for a quick&lazy way of presenting information for the audience.
Voice interface may become useful at some point, for some uses. But it won't be like Trek.
The PDA formerly known as Palm ...
How long will it take to get the GCC/PilRC toolset working with PalmOS on ARM?
How long will it take to get a working PalmOS Emulator using ARM?
Oh, I'll be able to buy MetroWerks Code Warrior? I see... That means I'll have to buy a Mac or a Windows PC. I won't be able to use my preferred development environment and I'll have to use an IDE which I don't particularly like.
I don't mean to complain (much) -- Palm has been great at making developers happy. I'm just a little worried about when or if a Free Software toolkit will be available.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Assuming they go with a StrongARM chip no slower than 200MHz at launch, one nifty thing is that the increase in power and speed over a 16MHz 68020-family chip like the Dragonball is so great that you could run the Dragonball-based Palm binaries on it at full speed in an emulation harness easily.
This should be fun.
So much for 2-month battery life from a pair of AAA cells, though.
How about a Slashdot interview with Jeff Hawkins?
"all ARM native"
n ewton/gnuton/
Actually, almost all of the NewtonOS (everything except for basic hardware interfaces, and apple's hwr) is in newtonscript. There haven't been any implementations of newtonscript anywhere except on arm cpus, but there is no reason for this (the two are completely unrelated). Apple's HWR is in C++ actually (and designed and coded under unix).
GNUton is a project to implement the NewtonOS in python, check out http://archive.dstc.edu.au/AU/staff/david-arnold/
My first thought when I say the mention of voice activation was "Who the hell wants to talk to their palm pilot?!". Yeah, the stylus input is irritating at times if you have to click a lot of buttons or you write a whole lot, but having known a number of friends with RSI that have tried voice recognition, I am really not eager to have my text undergo additional garbling at the hands of a pilot in need of a miracle ear. Hopefully, Palm will have the sense to keep voice activation as a disable-able option, or maybe relegate it to a particular product line (Palm IV? Palm VIII? Palm ((6!) + 8?))?), which I will then proceed not to buy. Does anyone out there see a rampant demand for a voice activated handheld?
The DragonBall has a 68000 history behind it, so it was a simpler move for a number of embedded engineers.
When Mr. Jobs cancelled the spin-off of Newton Inc, within 2 weeks 32 of the engineers from the Newton Project left in mass to Palm.
They followed a few others who had left eairler, and I'm sure told the 32 how wonderful it was to work at Palm.
As for the Newton technology in a Palm....
1) The original Graffitti authors are gone. So the sacred cow of graffitti can go. Same for the Dragonball.
2) The authors of rosetta are at Palm. They COULD do the handwriting on the palm (and rumor is this has happened...;-) ) BUT the Apple lawyers would sue.
SO....If Apple wants to market a re-labeled Palm, and Palm wants handwriting, the simplest way is to swap IP.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
That is just a pointless troll. If you had the courage of your convictions you would identify yourself. British technological innovation is alive and well thank you very much.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
If this is what I think it's about, this could easily be Palm's death sentence.
Seriously.
The Palm's setup is a very delicate balance of features and power, and changing it around needs to be done pretty carefully. Add a color screen, for example, and battery life might suffer. Change the serial port on the bottom, and suddenly several accessories don't work.
Swap the processor chip for a larger one? You get a *big* ripple.
Think about it. Yes, a lot of apps could be solved by a simple recompile. But what about those of us who use applications that are no longer being developed by the authors? We'll have to make do without those, which is one point against.
If Palm does include an emulation layer, that's going to require an even stronger processor. Thus, more power to said processor. And thusly, less battery efficiency. Another point against.
Consider, then, that there are three major things that get the Palm sold:
1) The size and simplicity of the device;
2) The gigantic number of accessories;
3) The *very* long term reliability.
Swap out the processor and 2 gets hurt badly, and 3 takes a hit as well.
(Oh, and as a totally aside thought - I'm not a Palm developer, so i don't know for certain, but... what happens to HackMaster, and all the hacks that come with it? Would *they* make it with just a recompile? Would they work reliably on an emulation layer?)
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
I had to re-read this post several times before I was able to believe it.
Palm must think very dimly of their HUGE already-established user base if they're trying to pull a stunt like this. Sure, whiz-bang new features are nice and all, but is the cost of an entire readily-available software base justifiable?
I know that if I want some new kind of whiz-bang program right now, I can go off to Palmgear or Tucows or even Joe's Web Site and download a Palm app, and I !!!KNOW!!! it will work. The Palm architecture has remained extremely stable, between hardware and OS releases. Hell, I even have some PalmOS 1.0 programs, written for the old Pilot 1000 (BEFORE "Palm" came into the title)... AND THEY STILL WORK!!! But when the new architecture takes over, poof, there go literally thousands of perfectly good programs. Sure, some of the developers will port, but that will take time (during which you can't use the program), and for commercial programs, I'm sure they won't just *GIVE* the upgrades away, being corporations and all. And what of the shareware/freeware/GPL developers? Can they afford to buy whole new development environments? And those using the free/GPL dev tools, well too bad! They don't generate the right kind of code any more!! THOSE will have to be ported as well.
I just went on a bit of a spending spree to outfit my new Handspring Visor Deluxe (GREAT machine, btw -- ignore the (mostly based on old/outdated information) reviews and get one today!) Got all sorts of cool goodies. Mobile WinFax, so that I can send FAXes from my new Handspring Modem module while on the go. Documents to Go, which lets me read those oh-so-common MS Office files. And probably my #1 most used program: Landware's Pocket Quicken. Since I use desktop Quicken to track my bank accounts, now I can have that exact same data on the go as well. Now I always know whether or not I can afford that new hard drive, or whether I have paid the phone bill already. The thought that I will most likely have to re-buy everything again, when I decide that I want the Next Big Thing, really irritates me. I've learned to expect this kind of behavior from Microsoft, NOT from Palm. Sigh, there goes the neighborhood.
A while back, I was forced to use (ugh, gag, puke) Windows CE devices at a (former) employer of mine. This was probably one of the most confusing things in the Universe. HPC, HPC Pro, or Palm PC (now Pocket PC)? SH1 or MIPS processor? COlor or B/W? I wanted to use ACT! on my Palm PC, so I went looking. Yeah, sure enough, Symantec had a WinCE version of ACT! But it was only for Handheld PC. Boo, hiss.
The new Palm IIIc has already helped start this type of schism in the Palm community. Now you have to know if your app is color enabled or not, before you know you can use it safely. The new CPU architecture will be even worse.
Palm, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???!?!
--
Donald Burr of Borg
WWW: http://www.borg-cube.com/
[= Resistance is futile! =]
Yomigaeru Aiyan Geek!!!
Anyway, ARM is fabless - want a 0.18micron 200MHz ARM processor doing 0.1W? Easy. Intel will release their StrongARM upgrade soon anyway - 400MHz StrongARMs!
Anyway, the fact that the StrongARM is so low power and is still at 0.35micron is a testament to is great design.
Anyway, Transmeta said that they wouldn't be writing a 68k emulation for the Crusoe, so it is all irrelevant anyway. I wish that people would research what they talk about before blabbing it all out here...
I'd have to agree with that.
:(
Speaking as a Palm user and a NaturallySpeaking user, I'd be delighted if they could be combined. It's far from perfect yet, but I'd say it's giving accuracy comparable to OCR programs 5-6 years ago. _Good_ OCR programs, that is. Certainly more accurate than Graffiti, which has started consistently misrecognising 'e', of all the letters to get wrong
Dictation is a valuable facility that works well. It's certainly something I regard as a worthwhile addition, and I can type pretty well.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!