On Fri, 2 Oct 1998, Scott Lee wrote: > doesn't the SA110 not have floating-point support in hardware? > anyone know for sure? that could be a nasty limitation for some > applications. Which applications were you thinking of, specifically? Surprisingly little applications actually use FP, and even fewer _need_ to use FP (they were just written that way because it is taken for granted that x86 processors higher than 486DX always have an FP unit). An example is XAudio who, instead of struggling to get the NetWinder to play MP3s using floating point emulation, simply rewrote it to use the StrongArm integer multiply instructions, which are very fast (1 or 2 instructions for a 32*32 multiply). Okay, if you want to do 3D rendering (virtual reality?) with your wearable, I could understand your reservations, but if you just want to do word processing, database stuff, etc. then the NetWinder is a very useful platform for this. The main problem is probably the high power consumption at about 13W, but that is with all the peripherals powered up (2 ethernet interfaces, 3 graphics chips, etc.), most of which can easily be powered down. --------------- Linux- the choice of a GNU generation. -------------- : Alex Holden (M1CJD)- Caver, Programmer, Land Rover nut, Radio Ham : -------------------- http://www.linuxhacker.org/ -------------------- -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.ml.org
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