PocketMatrix

Some news I saw over at BrightHand:
http://www.brighthand.com/article/Intel ... Processors
Looks like XScale will finnally shoot the old ARM proccs down.

From the article:
While the C1 is similar enough to the current models that it is a drop-in replacement, it does require a new ID Register. This means current users of handhelds won't be able to easily switch out processors.

What's that "new ID register", what is it used for and what's it doing outside the CPU?

Also, wouldn't a bigger problem for replacement be that it's unlikely that your unit can support a 200MHz bus speed? Unless of course manufacturers where aware of this when they made the current units... I'm guessing that theres no major point in running the C1 at a 100MHz bus speed.

Any ideas when PPCs with this chip will actually start to be avaiable?

The article mentions late March as a date (set by Intel) when manufacturers should have changed over.

Hopefully the existing model ranges will change over quite quickly. If I read correctly it's the slower of the Xscale chips that's being done first.

I suggest everyone to scan through this. It looks like they have completely changed the LMN values of the current xscale chips. The turbo mode no longer uses 1,1.5,2,2.5,3,5 multipliers, instead it's using a 1.5-2.3 multiplier. This means that they are probably changing the lcd/memclk frequency. So it looks like we might actually see a big performance boost. :D

Dustin

Update- Look at the picture on page 10, it looks like the memclk will be 32 up from 27, and the lcd controller is half the memclk at 16.

nevermind...

Dustin