Comments on: Quickies: Treo 300, OS 5, T-Blaster, SplashShopper, Australia

"Microsoft's current PDA operating system, Pocket PC 2002, is based on a Windows CE 3.0 kernel, which is optimised for a class of processors which includes StrongARM, but not Xscale.
So the rumours that the first Xscale products don't run any faster than StrongARM are almost certainly true."
http://c.moreover.com/click/here.pl?j40212430

Yes! I was just reading about this myself. For all the complaints we've heard here in PIC about OS 5 not taking full advantage of ARM processor technology (it uses PACE emulation) - at least Palm plans to have native ARM support with the next version which they plan to release quite soon after OS 5 (OS 5 units with flash ROM will be upgradable).

MS on the other hand - does not plan to optimize PPC 2002 for use with X-scale - prompting analysts and MS employees to state that there will basically be no performance gains when moving to higher speed x-scale devices! But the truly incredible part, is that the next version of PPC - built around the CE.net kernal - is also not optimized for x-scale! EVEN MORE AMAZING - the version after that will only be 'somewhat' optimized to take advantage of x-scale - but that won't be until 2004!! It looks like Palm is set to leap frog MS in terms of performance!

There is a lot of confusion out there in the press - I have seen articles on both WIRED and PDABuzz that mistakenly claim that Palm OS 5 uses StringARM - it does not! A PDABuzz article claimed that although PPC is not optimized for x-scale, that OS 5 was a geration behind because it was just starting to use StrongARM and was a long way from being optimizwed for x-scale. This is completley off the mark. StrongARM is a particular design (ARM technologies Type 4 architecture) manufactured by Intel and running only at 206mhz. Palm OS 5 runs on ARM Type 4T architecture - also designed by ARM, BUT licensed to Motorola, Intel, TI and others. This class of processor already supports 18mhz to 1Ghz!! I have written letters to the above mentioned news sources explaining their mistakes - i encourage everyone to do the same - let's make sure OS 5 does not get killed by eroneous bad press.

The next 2 yrs should be exciting as OS 5 is set to take the lead over PPC. If anyone knows different or sees some flaw in my logic here - please comment.

Scott