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Re: You want to use a pentium in your wearable, eh?

 writes:
 > 
 > >for at least the life cycle of Merced, which probably gives at minimum a

Last time I heard Merced will shut out free OSses due to a NDA. You'd
resort to clean room reverse engineering to port Linux to it.

Imo, Intel has really done it this time. There is a very good chance
Merced will be boycotted, provided the concurrence can offer adequate
performance. FYI, TI's 'c6x architecture has been shown in a
technology study to be transparently integrable into a vanilla SRAM
DIMM recently. Currently, the 'C6x core offers 1.2..1.6 GOPS, new
family member to deliver 1 GFlop by end 1998, and 3 GFlop/$50 by y2k.

 > >five-year life span. I'd like to see someone state honestly that any other
 > >processor, such as PowerPC, StrongARM, or MIPS, is guaranteed to give such
 > > a life span.
 > 
 > 	Just to be a devil's advocate, the most backwards compatible
 > popular chip line I know of is the DEC Alpha.  I'm told it still has
 > the full VAX 11/750 instruction set and can run the original code.
 > Heh! 

Alpha is cool. No! Hot. And requires egcs, gcc generates barfulous
code. Imo, AMD K6/266 is the perfect wearable chip, being very cool
due to the new voltage/structure shrink. Does not need a fan. Unless
heavily loaded, K6 runs very cool under Linux anyway.

ciao,
'gene

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