Palm to Shift to ARM Processor

krugdm writes "According to this article, Palm is expected to announce that it will be modifying its OS to run on faster ARM processors instead of the current Motorola Dragonball processor."

Comments

More CPU power can be useful for palm

[Lally Singh]

Palm's biggest advantage has always been their mission plan: be a good handheld organizer. Note that I didn't say 'handheld computer.'

Palm's single greatest asset has been a _WELL_DEFINED_ _PLAN_ and a _TARGET_MARKET_. CE's target market is "Palm's customers," without a second thought about _WHO_ those people are: salespeople, businesspeople, etc... you know, the _ordinary_user_, who doesn't really care that much about running a full web browser in their pocket (hence the philosophical difference between full internet connectivity and web clipping :full unadulterated access at disgustingly low speeds versus an efficient access point for the data most often accessed)... Don't let me go off on how little foresight or design MS actually puts into their products...

I don't see Palm turning their products into the ubergeek-toys that the CE crowd has been putting out: tiny handheld computers that are simply painful to use because they try to replace desktop computers with shitty, overpriced, small screened, keyboardless versions. Palm aims for the general public with a tool that lets you store your data, recall it, and otherwise, just gets out of your damn way.

CE's just turning into another Apple Newton: a handheld computer that's waaay too overpriced for too little functionality; useful only to those .1% of the computer buying population that can't possibly sit down and use a desktop for the majority of their real work.

Palm's probably going to use the new CPU power for things like a prettier GUI, voice recognition, MP3 playing, and perhaps some multimedia. At the end of the day, just improving what it does now: assists you with your life's tasks, not taking them over like CE.

But, let me end my random tirade on WinCE versus PalmOS... I'm afraid that the percentage of people here on /. that seek an ubergeek-toy is disproportionately high.

--Lally Singh, Palm Software Developer.

--

Re:More CPU power can be useful for palm

[MrBogus]

The Palm versus WinCE battle sorta reminds me of the old PC versus Mac versus Unix battle of the 1980s. Sure 90% of the people could get their work done fine and move along with an el cheapo DOS PC. However the other 10% couldn't shut up about their colorful graphical user interface with WYSIWYG printing, or their multi-user multi-tasking memory-protected super stable workstation.

Then one day, the Mac people and the Unix people woke up and figured that the PC could do almost exactly everything their specialized and more expensive systems could do.

It's the same thing in the handheld world, turned on it's head. Eventually WinCE-type handheld computers will have all the battery life, cost, and 'filofax' features of the Palm. BUT, if Palm gets the MPEG and Quake and Spreadsheet 'features' (which means a fast CPU and something resembling a real OS) before then without losing it's primary advantages, it will probably hold it's dominant marketshare lead forever.

Re:the world of incompatibility

[Moofie]

Keep in mind that despite the fact that Microsoft has utterly failed to make this sort of a transition work well, it has been done. Apple's emulation of 68k processors on PowerPC was pretty damn bulletproof. The overwhelming majority of software out at the time just kept on workin', with only modest speed penalties. After a recompile, it was off to the races.

This can be done, and done well. I just hope they don't spank their battery life (PalmOS's single hugest advantage) moving to this gee-whiz new processor.

The Real Limitations - Not CPU, though it helps

[billstewart]

My Palm7 is dog-slow. My Psion 3A wasn't, in spite of having 3 times as much gorgeous screen area and a 7.8MHz 8086-clone processor (Of course, having an excellent keyboard instead of a touch-screen with handwriting recognition saves a lot of horsepower.) Quadrupling the CPU might make the handwriting recognition faster and more accurate, and make up for the clunky operating system. And somebody else already commented that using an ARM core makes it much easier to use already-written ASIC libraries, which means that Palm can do more integration and keep costs down in the future, which is important when you want your product to cost less than 50 shares of your stock. The other big win is that changing processors gives you an excuse to fix some of the appallingly small limits built into the OS, like the 4KB data structures used for memos and email. The Psion had a few 32KB or 64KB limits from 8086 small model, but the last system I used with a 4KB limit was IBM 360 Assembler Language - the PDP-11 had gotten away from the PDP-8's 12-bit limit....

Memory is important, and it's pretty close to free. Selling a 2MB machine is tacky enough if you're doing it to get people to buy the overpriced memory expansion card, but there's simply no excuse for doing so on a non-expandable machine just to create product differentiation, or to bait&switch people into buying the much more expensive model just to get $6 more RAM. For many applications it doesn't matter, but if you want people do buy the box for things beyond the basics - ebooks, or industry-specific applications that require more data, or reading some real fraction of their email (especially using the overpriced radio link), you need more memory, sometimes lots more. Even if the future Palms don't play MP3s, storing compressed speech uses about 1MB per 20 minutes, so it helps to have more memory.

Better Screens - the Psion 3a has 480x160 mono, and lasts about as long on batteries as the Palm; the WinCE and iPaQ machines really do have good-looking screens, more readable as well as flashy, but the battery life is too short for practicality.

Audio, especially speech recognition - that does need more horsepower, though some of it can be done with ASICs like cell-phone voice compression instead of the CPU if that makes sense. Microsoft is going after the MP3-player / Video Game / TV set in your pocket market, but for business users and other people who want organizers rather than toys, the two obvious directions to go are cellphone capability and speech recognition interfaces to the box, and those may be CPU burners.

SDK builds processors?

[molo]

Motorola, TI and Intel will use Palm's software developer kit to build processors using ARM technology, sources say.

Man, thats some SDK. Why don't my SDKs do that?

One chance for glory

[steveha]

This is a risky move, but if Palm does it right it will pay off. They only get one chance.

Apple showed it can be done. Apple really did a great job of smoothly transitioning their users over to the PowerPC.

As long as they are doing this, Palm needs to break out of the 160x160 display trap. I'm sure they are eager to do it. All the current Palm apps, when running under emulation, can have a 160x160 box to run in, but new software can have more room. And, Palm needs to release two different reference designs, with different screen sizes, just to make people get serious about testing their apps with different screen sizes.

I'd be thrilled if they used this as an opportunity to transition from PalmOS to Linux, with the emulator running PalmOS of course. If they did a good job on the SDK, people should be able to recompile PalmOS apps to run under the new Linux. I don't have a feel for how likely this is, but it would give Palm more control over their destiny, and save them paying licensing fees.

They should make sure the new Palm can play DTMF tones through its speaker; people have been crying for this since the first Palm. Look up a phone number, hold the Palm next to the phone, and click on "Dial" and the Palm makes DTMF tones and dials for you. I'd like that.

If they make it rock-solid reliable, and give it really long battery life, this transition could be a very good thing. Oh, and they need to keep making DragonBall Palms for a while: don't make people feel they are being forced at gunpoint to switch.

steveha

More difficult for Handspring

[steveha]

This will be more difficult for Handspring than for Palm. The Springboard is basically a direct connection to the DragonBall's bus, so I can't see how it would be very easy to do a compatible Springboard on an ARM chip. Also, Springboard modules have code on board for the cool plug-and-play, and that code is of course DragonBall code.

So, does Handspring stick with the DragonBall? Or do they try to emulate the Springboard bus using the ARM? Or do they do Springboard 2.0 using the ARM bus? Or can they do a new bus that isn't so tightly coupled to the CPU's bus? (How about making the plug-and-play use some sort of portable bytecode?)

By the way, I hope Handspring will adopt the "universal connector" idea Palm introduced with their latest devices. Having both a serial port and a USB port is a nice thing. Having both of them plus a Springboard would be even better.

steveha

Strike A New POSE

[FrankDrebin]

The shift to ARM will mean of course incompatible binaries for all those vendor-supplied and open-source projects. Generally not too big a deal since there are lots of tools for ARM (gcc supports cross-compiling to ARM of course).

But, perhaps more interestingly, a new version of POSE is required. Development of the original POSE (nee CoPilot) is a fascinating story of reverse-engineering, ingenuity, and personal persistence of Greg Hewgill. Do a Google search for 13hewgil.pdf for an interesting account.

Let's hope Palm publishes the data sheet for the chip they're using -- unlike the originally secret Dragonball -- so POSE can be implemented for the new architecture without too much headache.

Maybe they should have considered...

[Bonker]

Shogakukan's 'Ranma' processor. If you douse it in cold water, it transforms into an 'ARM', but if you pour hot water over it, it changes back into a 'Dragonball'.

"Oh sirs, very tragic story of microprocessor that drown in spring one thousand, two hundred year ago!"

Okay, enough with the stupid anime jokes already.

Need for speed

[spellcheckur]

I don't know about you, but my Palm is great for the limited things I call on it to do.

It essentially replaces my organizer, which was, as far as I can tell, it's intended purpose.

Why does it need to get faster. More memory I understand, color and backlighting and better batteries also, but are people really feeling the lag when looking up phone numbers or appointments?

How about making the things cheaper? I don't want a palm to replace a computer... if I did, I'd buy an iPaq (and put linux on it). I want it to take care of scheduling, take notes and remember phone numbers.
...oh, and I guess a few simple games never hurt anybody.

What I want to know is, why does my palm really need to be faster?