by Christian Amor Kvalheim » Jan 28, 2001 @ 8:33am
Neither the MIPS or StrongARM core has a FPU core. The decision to exclude the FPU core was made to save space on the Chip Die (reducing cost of production) and because the two chips are targeted for the embedded market, not the desktop one. That means that any program using floating point math will get a HUGE performance penalty, given that the FPU math core needs to be emulated in software.<br><br>You basically need to treat the StrongARM processor as a Intel 386 without the floating point core (you needed a 387 for that).. Fixed Integer Math is therefore the only viable solution to increase performance in any 3D application on the Pocket PC's. I do not know enough about the new ARM core being developed by Intel, but lets hope they integrate a FPU core..<br><br>Just now, I think that they will be able to port Quake and even get decent performance. A lot of the time is spent in the transformation of matrixes (rotation, lighting).. The display drawing should not be a major problem, considering that you are only pushing 320*240 pixels. Hopefully they can use 1 byte pr. pixel. Using 16 bit (12 bit) is pretty wasteful because of the extra overhead required in the drawing. 256 colors should be suficient for Quake..