Thread: Why are ebook readers so slow?
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Old 07-02-2012, 12:17 PM   #32
Edward M. Grant
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Join Date: Jun 2012
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ilovejedd View Post
According to the MR Wiki, the PRS-300 has a Freescale i.MXL MC9328MXLVP20 (ARM920T core, 200MHz) CPU. Yes, it's going to be slow.
It's not so long ago that a 200MHz RISC CPU would have been considered blindingly fast. Back in the mid-90s I had a Sun workstation with a 40MHz CPU and 32MB of RAM and never complained about the speed.

You're right that e-reader CPUs are chosen to be 'just fast enough', but I still don't understand why they seem so slow on an absolute level. They're basically just uncompressing a .zip file, reading the HTML it contains and formatting that for display, which seems easy enough... the Sun seemed to do it faster with a CPU running at a tenth of the speed.
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