Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 06:36:50 03/14/02
Go up one level in this thread
On March 14, 2002 at 04:42:33, Alastair Scott wrote:
>On March 14, 2002 at 03:18:01, Richard A. Fowell wrote:
>
>>What does that mean for existing Palm software - will it be like when
>>the Macintosh changed from 680X0 to PowerPC? In that transition, there
>>were three flavors of software:
>>(1) Written for the old chip - run native on old machines, and in
>> emulation on the new machines (at some efficiency cost)
>>(2) "Fat" (both types of object modules in one file - run native on
>> either old or new chip, but memory bulky (leading to "stripper"
>> utilities to get rid of the non-useful one on your machine
>>(3) Written for the new chip - fast and efficient on the new chip,
>> but would not run on older machines.
>
>I believe more or less this; PalmOS 5 will be transitional, with emulation
>allowing old (Motorola Dragonball) packages to run, then PalmOS 6, notionally
>released in 2003, will move fully to Intel/ARM XScale. Of course, this could
>change and, given that a tremendous head of steam has been built up in existing
>PalmOS applications, methinks either emulation or some form of binary
>translation will always be there in the background ...
>
>>In particular, I get the impression that Chess Genius for Palm is
>>680X0 assembly, and Tiger is largely in C, so I would imagine it
>>easier for Tiger to take advantage of this change than Genius.
>>(Unless Richard has ARM assembly engines around, which he might).
>
>Certainly, Genius is written in Motorola assembler; Richard Lang mentioned to me
>that he wouldn't be doing much to it until the new Intel/ARM-based machines
>turned up as the Motorola-based engine had reached the limits of its
>capabilities ...
>
>Alastair
I think you are mostly right.
I think that future PalmOS versions will always have a 68XXX emulator, because
the new wave of ARM-based Palms does not mean the end of the DragonBall ones.
This is going to be a major advantage of the PalmOS computers: they will offer a
range of models that PocketPCs cannot cover. Low end models will start at very
low prices ($100 and maybe below) and will be powered by cheap 20MHz DragonBall
(68XXX) processors.
In the high end you will find in 2003 or 2004 Palm handheld powered by 1GHz
XScale processors.
All this range of devices will be able to run the programs designed for current
Palms (programs designed to run on PalmOS 3.x and 4.x). That represents
thousands of applications, with many of them being of good quality.
So to answer Richard's question, if you have a 68XXX DragonBall based model, you
will download the 68XXX version of the program. If you have an ARM based model,
you can download and run the 68XXX version if no ARM version exists. But if an
ARM version is there, just use this version of the program.
I don't think we will see programs containing both (68XXX and ARM) executables.
As for Chess Tiger, it is written 100% in C. So when I get my hands on the
PalmOS 5 ARM compiler I just recompile it (well I know some extra work will be
needed) and produce a very fast ARM version. And then the real power of the
Chess Tiger engine will show up, because I can tell you that the 68XXX is not
the ideal processor for Tiger.
Christophe
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