>> huge disparity between the CPU clock speed and the onboard memory
> I think that's RISC "working as intended"; the tradeoff was always supposed to be that you got to issue lots of simple instructions at high speed.
I see.
> I can't find what manufacturing process they're using (?nanometers) but it sounds like it's simply a "why not?" outcome of the design process that the chip is very fast.
Heh.
> It doesn't have all that many peripherals either, by modern standards.
This looks to me to have all the hallmarks of a first-gen MVP. A very decent offering likely with some long-term support, but an MVP nonetheless.
I noticed that, it's a fascinating design tradeoff they picked.
> SRAM just takes up a lot of space. Hard to tell without gate counts or die shots but the 16k+16k could easily be over half the die.
Wow, TIL
> EPOC is one of those extraordinary things that can be called a great technological achievement with a tiny dedicated fandom that nonetheless became a dead-end. Like Amiga, Concorde, BBC Domesday Project, etc. I do wish we could have snappier GUIs on our ten-times-faster systems.
Mmm. I consider it insane that the Web is as slow as it is, but it makes a sad sort of sense. I've been wondering about making a cut-down general-purpose information rendering engine with a carefully-designed graphical feature set that's really easy to optimize. Would be really cool.
EPOC was awesome: some hand-wavy testing showed me that the OPL environment was fast enough to support full-screen haptic scrolling of information. It would have totally worked in just a few simple lines of code. If only full-panel capacitative touch were viable in '98 ;)
> I think that's RISC "working as intended"; the tradeoff was always supposed to be that you got to issue lots of simple instructions at high speed.
I see.
> I can't find what manufacturing process they're using (?nanometers) but it sounds like it's simply a "why not?" outcome of the design process that the chip is very fast.
Heh.
> It doesn't have all that many peripherals either, by modern standards.
This looks to me to have all the hallmarks of a first-gen MVP. A very decent offering likely with some long-term support, but an MVP nonetheless.
> Edit: the answer is here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13067833 - other chips that have onboard Flash are necessarily slower. This doesn't, so it can be faster.
I noticed that, it's a fascinating design tradeoff they picked.
> SRAM just takes up a lot of space. Hard to tell without gate counts or die shots but the 16k+16k could easily be over half the die.
Wow, TIL
> EPOC is one of those extraordinary things that can be called a great technological achievement with a tiny dedicated fandom that nonetheless became a dead-end. Like Amiga, Concorde, BBC Domesday Project, etc. I do wish we could have snappier GUIs on our ten-times-faster systems.
Mmm. I consider it insane that the Web is as slow as it is, but it makes a sad sort of sense. I've been wondering about making a cut-down general-purpose information rendering engine with a carefully-designed graphical feature set that's really easy to optimize. Would be really cool.
EPOC was awesome: some hand-wavy testing showed me that the OPL environment was fast enough to support full-screen haptic scrolling of information. It would have totally worked in just a few simple lines of code. If only full-panel capacitative touch were viable in '98 ;)