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XScale PDA Processor Shrinking

bookemdano writes "Intel announces first stacked processor for their XScale line. No core speed increases but the smaller sizes helps with power, overall unit size, and adding additional pieces like WiFi and color screens to smart phones and MP3 players. But speed increases are in the future."

2 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. Another Xscale alternative by toybuilder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been working with the AMD Alchemy family chips. In our particular situation, it ran faster, used less power, and was priced much lower than the XScale chips that we considered.

    It is a wonderful little piece of silicon with lots of integrated peripherals, low power, and great performance. It is built around a MIPS architecture processor core.

    Linux-MIPS runs great on this chip.

    Check them out.

  2. Re:As an embedded engineer by ObviousGuy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We've got these Lubbock reference boards sitting around the lab now. When we first fired them up we thought they were broken. One excuse I've heard is that the MS compilers are not good, but still you'd expect that the same ARMV4I (SA1100 and XScale) code would execute faster on the newer XScale chip than on the older SA.

    I don't know if this is a dead end product for Intel, but they better start putting out some compilers that take advantage of the XScale improvements or there won't be many customers left. A lot of our customers are going with the platform because we've already got a kit for it that can get them up and running immediately, but there's a lot of complaints about speed regardless.

    --
    I have been pwned because my /. password was too easy to guess.