IDF Fall 2002: live from San Jose, continued
IDF brought the announcement of Wireless MMX.
Essentially, Wireless MMX resembles MMX, but features some extensions and changes. Of course, these two are not compatible. However, the new technology supports SSE2 integer part as well, that requires some source code changes. An interesting analogy: our reporter, Alexandr Medvedev says that Wireless MMX is very close to vector macros of Itanium processors. :-)
Wireless MMX was developed for future ARM-based products. Current XScale PXA250 and 210 do not support it, but in about 9 month there will be new generation of chips, supporting Wireless MMX.
Also remember that Intel is the only company that hasn´t licensed the ready core from ARM, but only instruction set, and have made its own processor core to implement its extended version.
So, Wireless MMX offers 43 instructions, similar to MMX and to SSE2 integer part.
Alexandr has spoken with one of Wireles MMX developers, who narrated the further company plans. Very interesting: in about two generations the developers are going to add floating point extension, similar to SS2, to XScale Wireles MMX.
Another interesting announcement: there was new PCA (XScale) technology announced, enabling to run programs directly from flash memory!
As you know, previously programs were copied to RAM, that took precious time. Now there´s a possibility to execute them directly from flash without any latencies.
Intel not only plans to use this technology in its developments (XScale), but also to license it to all willing, as any flash will do.
And now the day´s highlight. It has been announced that XScale-based products controlled by PalmOS 5 will appear in the market soon!!!
Palm has already certified its OS from Intel. Though, XScale products under PalmOS 5 wil be produced not by Palm, but by other makers.
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