Nable wrote:
~ wrote:
There's also the older BenQ S6, Intel Atom x86 at 800 MHz (can supposedly be overclocked to around 1 GHz), 512 MB RAM, 2 GB 1.8 disk, can use 16 GB MicroSD cards (doesn't seem to be able to boot from them but probably can use 32, 64 or 128-Gigabyte cards), has 1 mini USB port, has speaker, touchscreen, headphones, WiFi. Can run Windows XP, DOS, Linux (Windows 98 seems to fail, sadly, but could probably be installed somehow), has AMI BIOS. Only uses around 5 Watts constantly. Can run several games from the Windows 98 and Windows XP era.
This device can only run for 1-2 hours on battery (and it's too bulky, it can hardly be called pocket-size nowadays, I think that embryo2 included some sarcasm when he said "It's really mobile."). It's not even funny, it's just ridiculous. 5W in idle mode can't be called 'only', it is enormous for mobile devices.
~ wrote:
They could use a Flash as a RAM. It's even cheaper than RAM.
You should study the subject deeply. Serial NAND flash (that is used in micro-SD and other solid-state storage) isn't random-accessible and in most tasks is awfully slow, as it provides good bulk performance but huge latency for small requests (and very huge latency for write ones). Parallel NOR flash is random-accessible but it's also slow (compared to RAM) and it's not cheap at all.
~ wrote:
Look at how other devices like the Palm LifeDrive even use a MicroDrive hard disk as part of the RAM.
It cannot be called "part of the RAM", it's plain old swapping and it's slow and dumb way of doing things.
~ wrote:
I'm currently running my web server from one of these.
Oh, I've tried accessing it yesterday and was really wondering why is it so sloooow. Ok, now I got the idea that you are of that kind of people who prefer doing things in a difficult way because "it's very hard but still possible, so let's do it in a usual way instead of a right one".
My website is slow because of my forum, which contains HTML templates with highly unoptimized PHP code. If I remove it, the website is very smooth, but I want to fix my forum because it's a good automated, indexed content aggregator to point to other resources.
About the RAM, the Palm LifeDrive works well for a 500 MHz machine and for using the disk as RAM to arrange the whole system as a preloaded ROM image.
An x86 phone could also use a MicroSD as a ROM to read the system into normal RAM, which could be restored easily even if the CPU is shut down and reset every time the user turns off the screen to wait for calls.
It could be used for many tasks that aren't critical or for running programs in emergency situations where the main RAM is full.
I think that it would run greatly for an x86 phone, specially if they use quad core CPUs of around 2 GHz. Then it could easily run the things people always want like PC and DOS emulators with increasing ease through iterations of phones, memory controllers/modules and CPUs.