Key Technologies: CPUs

A lot of "new" chips are being hilighted in the handheld computer/PDA field lately. Chips by NEC, Hitachi and Philips are in the currently available Windows CE units. The two recently announced Newtons (MP-2000 and eMate300) use ARM 710 and Digital/ARM "StrongARM 110" chips. All these chip technologies have been in use for some time really, but for the desktop computerists, you might not be familiar with them. The following two sites are fairly technical and won't mean much to most consumers, but if you're a developer, you might want to check out these technologies. So far I've only found two sites. The Hitachi URL came from a posting to the Usenet newsgroups by Daniel Gentleman without my asking. This is not really surprising since a lot of people will be interested in finding out this information.

Advanced RISC Machines
SH-3: SH7702/7708 Product Brief
[1997/01/06]

Franklin Announces Proprietary RISC for Bookman Products

Aug. 27, 1997, PR Newswire reports that Franklin Electronic Publishers, Inc. has announced its ES-1 proprietary 8/24 bit pipeline RISC CPU. Using 8 bit instruction opcodes with 24 bit general purpose registers allows use of high level compilers, backward compatibility with existing card applications and very low cost. A 24 bit address buss allows up to 16MB data addressing. Backward compatibility was maintained by emulation of a 65C02 CPU used in first generation Bookman products. Franklin is seeking licensing opportunities for the new CPU.

http://www.franklin.com/
[1997/09/02]

Book Index

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Last update 1999/03/15.