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Subject: Re: Palm Pilot or CE Chess Programs

Author: Scott Ludwig

Date: 09:59:14 09/21/99

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On September 21, 1999 at 01:36:57, Christophe Theron wrote:

[...]
>Nice to see you here. Do you read CCC on a regular basis, or did somebody read
>my previous message and informed you?

Thanks. I read the forum fairly often and saw your post myself. This forum is a
great info source; I wish the archives were content indexed to allow for
searching!

[...]
>Motorola in his technical documents says 2.7 MIPS...
>

It is possible to write a 68328 piece of code that will execute at 2.7 mips @
16mhz. However, this averages out to 6 clocks per instruction. The PalmPilot
execution format accesses any global via an offset off an address register
(usually a4 or a5) - an expensive addressing method, but it allows for data
location independence. If you do any array lookup, it's even more work because
the C compilers available first calculate the base address of the array with one
instruction, then lookup in the array with another instruction. The 12 clock
average per instruction is real; it comes from a PalmPilot emulator that keeps
these sort of statistics while running real applications.

>Have you done a numeric comparison between the MIPS and the Palm? Looks like
>PocketChess is the perfect benchmark!
>
>I'd like to know what the speed difference is, really.

I haven't, but I will do it and post it on my site - good idea.

[...]
>Tell me, how many days will last your batteries on this kind of WinCE computer,
>compared to the battery life of the Palm?

The Palm comes in two types - the Palm V which has a rechargable battery, and
the others which use two AAA's. The two AAA's last much longer than the
rechargable on the Palm. In any case, either Palm lasts much much longer than
any CE device. My experience is that a CE device will last 10 hours of constant
use if you're lucky before requiring recharging. A Palm on two AAA's will last
literally months of regular, normal use. There is no comparison - the Palm is a
hard benchmark to follow because it's so good with battery life.

Scott



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