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Guide To Designing Low Power Handhelds
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."
Unless these handheld companies can figure how to improve input into these tiny little computers, it doesn't matter how fast the CPU chip is because my big mitts won't get the data into fast enough for it to matter. To me, they are nothing more than a static data storage and regurgitation device, not an interactive system like my notebook or desktop.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
CPU power is not the issue when it comes to portable computing. The real holy grail will be in acceptable display technology. Whether that be some sort of expanding/folding display technology or a lasar retinal display, something significantly better than our current technology is needed to really make a significant jump in usability and functionality.
The matter is applicable on heat prevention on laptops: Those out that having a laptop with dynamically activated cpu-fan know the problem. Constantly running processes will activate the fan and increase the noise polution- it doesn't matter if the process is nice or not.
To gain a silent PC we would only need a daemon which constantly checks the CPU-temperature and slows down the system (starting or only from processes with lower priority) to prevent heat and noise.
Not to mention that this would even increase battery-power if only less important jobs are slowed down and thus fan activation is decreased to a minimum.
This really sounds like a neat feature, not complicated to implement- or is there already a project out there dealing with this?
A handheld is not supposed to replace a computer. It's supposed to provide useful functions like keeping to-do lists, schedules, phone directories, unit conversion programs, notes, etc. A good handheld design is a carefully engineered compromise between battery life, features, and speed. That's something that Palm and Handspring have pretty much understood. Only when Microsoft entered the market did people start demanding that handhelds come with 200mhz CPUs, ooh-gobs of RAM, and displays that ran the color spectrum from UV to IR.
A handheld is not an MP3 player. It's not a tiny laptop computer. It's not supposed to run X-Windows, FTP, or a web server. It's not supposed to be used for SETI at home, factoring huge primes, or playing first-person shooter games. I want month-long battery life, not a handheld with a heatsink and 10,000rpm fan. Don't screw up the market by demanding things that sway manufacturers to sell toys for geeks rather than tools for professionals.