Oops... >And the old 8/16 bit chips are still very useful >for projects not requiring graphics intensive stuff. Have you ever noticed >that Word98 runs the same speed on the new PentiumII's as it does on old 8 >bit 64k byte machines that ran at a humble 1 MHz? Of course I didn't mean that Word98 runs on old 8 bit processors, I meant that the old word processors written for, and running on, old 8 bit processors ran at comparable speeds to new, bloated Word processors on super-duper processors. I can't help feeling that unless you want to do 3D graphics there is little need for really high speed processors. 2D graphics processing can readily be offloaded onto a graphics processor, so that the main CPU only really needs to keep track of characters in text, style tags, and which window is active. All other functions like window position, graphical layout, font styles, etc could be done at much lower power consumption by dedicated hardware. Even playing MPEGs and manipulating 3D graphics is better done by dedicated hardware than by tying up the CPU. This means that for efficient (i.e. useable battery life) wearable computing we should not be looking just to high-end processors, but to what would be the most effective use of electricity. This may actually require multiple chip designs for anything more than character-based displays... at least in the short term. Cheers, - Miriam --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Linux: Choice of a GNU Generation! -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.ml.org
From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH)
Maintained by R. Paul McCarty
Archive created with babymail