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Subject: Re: Is this the fastest Pocket PC running at 400 Mhz ?

Author: Roy Eassa

Date: 14:36:55 10/25/02

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On October 23, 2002 at 17:00:35, Paul J. Messmer wrote:

>
>Well, not really.  One of the PDAs that I own is a Toshiba e740, which is a
>Pocket PC with the same Intel 400MHz PXA250 processor as the ASUS.  It's a lot
>faster for chess than my (Dragonball) Palm, but not as fast you might think.
>
>Pocket Fritz on this machine only gets a few thousand nodes per second, similar
>to a build of Crafty running on the e740.  My rough estimate is that for chess,
>this PDA gets the equivalent performance of something like a 33 Mhz Pentum (like
>the original P5 architecture, with only L1 cache and no L2 cache).
>
>Interestingly, when comparing this PDA to a Compaq iPaq with a different ARM
>processor (not an XScale from Intel, and only running at ~200 Mhz), Pocket Fritz
>was 10% FASTER on the iPaq!  DOH!  Double the Mhz, take 10% off of performance
>on the same binary :-)  I don't know whether to attribute this to a possibly
>different memory architecture between the machines, or the differences in
>microarchitecture between the processors (the XScale has a longer pipeline for
>example), or what.


From what I hear, it's because the OS does not properly handle the processor's
special modes (it normally isn't supposed to run at 400 MHz all the time).

I bet a future (the next?) version of the OS will make all the PPC chess
programs suddenly a lot stronger.


>
>It's far faster than my old Palm.  But definitely at least an order of magnitude
>slower than a 400 mhz PC.
>


New Palm OS machines will be able to use the same processor, but shouldn't
suffer from the above-described issue.



>On October 23, 2002 at 07:17:19, ludicrous wrote:
>
>>Wow!  400 mhz!  Like carrying with you a portable pentium 3!  Pocket Fritz would
>>be delighted!



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