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Guide To Designing Low Power Handhelds

Posted by Hemos on from the learning-all-about-it dept.

randomErr writes "iAppliance had a nifty article about designing handhelds. As the state-of-the-art in low-power CPUs races forward, the CPU becomes one of the most critical components in the design of a handheld. New CPUs such as Intel's XScale, Alchemy Semiconductor's Au1000, and Transmeta's Crusoe provide the ability to scale clock frequency and voltage dynamically. As power consumption varies linearly with clock speed and as the square of core voltage, you'll want to have hardware hooks to be able to adjust both clock speed and voltage as necessary, based on device performance."

2 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Re:But when can I have a.... by idfrsr · · Score: 2, Funny

    Actually you would probably want something like this....

    1) Buy 1 suitably active cat or suitably small dog.

    2) Attach appropiate self-charging generator to faithful pet's collar

    3) Find a way to get the generated power into your PC without using any wires.

    4) Load Quake

    5) Get a another hyper-active pet to run your nearby beer fridge

    6) Enjoy FPS, with a cold beer and low power bills,

    --
    "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
  2. Strange analogy by ncoder · · Score: 2, Funny
    you have to realize that an out-of-context power consumption specification for a component or a board is about as meaningful as an interrupt latency specification is for a real-time operating system.

    This is the first time i've ever seen an analogy more complex than the original statement.