An Interesting and yet powerful webpad

I actually feel the memory buses or somthing in the Sig3 are a bit of a bottleneck. I have tried a few times and USB and SD seems very slow to transfer data to ram. Slower than you would expect so think CPU decoding is probablly being held back by the time it takes for data to get to CPU.

Looking at how much faster the Smartbook is browsing and transferring files etc. is to the Sig3 (bearing in mind smartbook is Storngarm 206Mhz) I feel there is probablly quite a lot of gains to be made in a well designed systemboard and drivers in a unit using same CPU as Sig3.

Though as you say not sure a cpu would have any chance of that sort of decoding.

There are lots of devices I would like. I have a smartbook which covers my small laptop replacement ie somthing to do extended typing or browsing on (though again I will maybe look to update the SB if somthing nice with a 7" screen and Arm Cortex comes along - though hopefully a SB custom rom will make it even more usefull for moment). I would like a sig3 replacement (somthing that will go in pocket) though I may have a look in 12month (when contract is up) at what sort of phones are about as a phone with a 5" widescreen and useable keyboard would probablly do nicely in that department. Lastly would probs like some sort of tablet with good size screen but nice and thin and light for couch browsing.

Hope the tablet works out for you it looks very nice.

John

Could be due to the USB 1.1 host port(s) or the speed of the SD card.

Not so sure. IIRC the guy who develops dvd catalyst reckoned the Imagion should have been almost capable of decoding DVD mpeg 2 data as it was a hardware decoder. but no matter where I stored video data (even a small file on internal ram) or codec used. The throughput (not FPS) which I was told again by dva catalyst guy was a measure of the card or memory bus didn't really increase much over 2.4mbps or there abouts, my memory is a little hazy on exact figure (dvd iirc is 8mbps).

Now if it was card or card reader there would have been a noticeable change in this figure.

John

For the optimization and performance issues, I think web browsing on smartbook is very smooth, considering its hw specs.

i used to own a Smartbook and S3. I seldom did usb-to-ram copy operation on S3. So no idea about the bus issue. But web browsing on smartbook is certainly better than that on S3. At some time, i even thought Smartbook could almost be an ideal instant-on machine for light browsing. Probably coz G138 has 128M ram vs 64m on S3?

Even web browsing on this new pda with pxa255 and 128M ram is not a match for Smartbook with StrongARM 206. I did some browsing on this new toy. I just could not get that kind of feeling browsing sites on g138. Dont know why. Maybe G138 is more optimized than most of its competitors?

As the highest bitrate of video playback, my pda can probably do 1.4mbps. My test was based on the standard tcpmp test file, 640*480 divx file of 1.5mbps. My benchmark data is about 90% (800*600 fullscreen), while S3 is about 120% according to the most complete tcpmp benchmark colletion made by a Japanese pda pal.(of coz, he no longer updates this colletion. but the old data are still available) So i do not quite understand why the S3's highest bitrate is 2.4mbps. different type of standard?

Btw, the followings are part of the settings from my atixxx file in \windows folder:

"XtalClk"=dword:16
"NormClkFreq"=dword:80
"FastClkFreq"=dword:80
"PixelClkSrc"=dword:0x01
"SClkSrc"=dword:0x02
"AutoPwr"=dword:0x00
"ExtMemCfg"=dword:3
"ExtMemEnable"=dword:1
"ChipPhysAddr"=dword:0x14000000
"PM4IdleIntEnable"=dword:0
"PM4RBSize"=dword:13

well iamjoe i was able to get 2.5mbps on sig3 just fine, i guess it depends on the video encoding too (it was avi files)

Edited by cmonex 2008-11-09 3:40 PM

you'd get the same results if it was the ati chip itself, or if tcpmp's code wasn't perfectly optimized for it.

a better test might be file copying (of course don't forget that the object store compresses the files so that's a bit slowing it down when doing it in RAM)

Edited by cmonex 2008-11-09 3:43 PM