Motorola to Make Dragonball Chips ARM Compatible?

Posted By: Ed on Monday, December 11, 2000 8:19:28 AM

Motorola has scheduled a press conference for later today to discuss the future of its Dragonball chip, the processor that powers all of Palm's and Handspring's devices. Cnet, citing "sources", is predicting that Motorola will "will outline a move to make the chip compatible with the ARM architecture, which is capable of giving [Palm's] handhelds a considerable performance gain."

Just last week, Motorola licensed ARM's 32-bit processor architecture. Palm has already stated that at some point in the future they will switch to ARM processors.

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I love it !

I.M. Anonymous @ 12/11/2000 9:13:47 AM #

That means all existing apps will run on new ARM based Palms... That sounds great. I'm wondering compatibility will slow down whole power of ARM architecture. It can be compared with Windows NT that wanted to make compatibility with old 16bit appz. Win2000 left all these old app behind a back.

Remember 0x0 to PPC?

bighead @ 12/11/2000 4:23:25 PM #

when the mac went from the mc68040 to the ppc 601, they included an 040 emulator in rom. they could do something like that.

Sounds good

DU @ 12/11/2000 10:42:31 PM #

I they do a good job we may get the best of both worlds, the simplicity and variety of software of Palm with the power of CE machines.

Palm Software on sale