Kindle 3 technical specifications

[Stonecold]

Just because a processor runs at the same rate as the one in the Kindle doesn't mean there is any similarity in processing speed or capacity. For exampe, my Nintendo Wii has the clock rate of a 7 yesr old Mac, but can a Mac render 20 million polygons per second? I don't think so! Your computer could do what a Kindle couldn't because it had a more powerful processor even if the clock rate was the same.

What is your explanation?

[Stonecold]

Just because a processor runs at the same rate as the one in the Kindle doesn't mean there is any similarity in processing speed or capacity. For exampe, my Nintendo Wii has the clock rate of a 7 yesr old Mac, but can a Mac render 20 million polygons per second? I don't think so! Your computer could do what a Kindle couldn't because it had a more powerful processor even if the clock rate was the same.

What is your explanation?

[Stonecold]

Oops. Sorry for the double post...

[curstpriest]

GPU and CPU are two entierly different things. The wii has an ATI radeon GPU with its dedicated memory, I think it also has like 512mb system memory and ARM processor that doesn't touch 3d rendering. Likewise, when you use the opera browser it does not touch the 3d chipset (unless for some reason it is using it for acceleration, like rendering a 2d page as a 3d texture for speed/smooth scrolling, but that is purely aesthetic)

Don't get software rendering confused with hardware rendering. The nintendo wii's 500 mhz processor or w/e doesn't do rendering. Go install Q2test (if you have homebrew), and you can play quake 2 using software rendering, much the same way we did back in the day before 3d accelerator cards were mainstream, that's executing raw code all on the main CPU I think. It's quite slow and looks rather bad, but is playable. Though that game ran on my 200mhz Pentium pro like a beast. ID games have always been rather beastly however.

[Stonecold]

The Nintendo Wii has a 700 MHz CPU, not a 500 MHz one. And yes, I have tried homebrew games on my Wii using only it's CPU and the rendering was still much better than anything a 7 year old Mac could do.

And you're right. Wii does have 512 MB DRAM.

I know the differences between hardware and software rendering, by-the-way. The difference is quite striking when you compare hardware and software bezier curves.

[curstpriest]

some confusion, regardless, you were not factoring in GPU as you stated earlier. I was confused with GC specs, and some articles confused the nand size with ram (lol?). Apparently the wii has very small amount of ram, which makes sense, because it really doesn't need much.

http://wii.ign.com/articles/699/699118p1.html

IBM's "Broadway" CPU is clocked at 729MHz, according to updated Nintendo documentation. By comparison, GameCube's Gekko CPU ran at 485MHz.

Revolution's ATI-provided "Hollywood" GPU clocks in at 243MHz. By comparison, GameCube's GPU ran at 162MHz, while the GPU on the original Xbox was clocked at 233MHz. Sources we spoke with suggest that it is unlikely the GPU will feature any added shaders, as has been speculated.

The overall system memory numbers we reported last December have not greatly fluctuated, but new clarifications have surfaced. Revolution will operate using 24MBs of "main" 1T-SRAM. It will additionally boast 64MBs of "external" 1T-SRAM. That brings the total number of system RAM up to 88MBs, not including the 3MB texture buffer on the GPU. By comparison, GameCube featured 40MBs of RAM not counting the GPU's on-board 3MBs.

so
733MHz CPU
88 mb RAM
512 mb NAND flash

243MHz GPU

Again, my point still carries on. My Macintosh Performa 5200 could go online (I soon had ISDNx128, sdsl, and then later cable), surf the net, and do all that I needed back in 93-95 and it had shit specs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_M...sh_5000_series

75 MHZ
32 mb RAM (upgraded from 8, because I was that cool)
700 mb HD?

Also realize with technology THIS OLD the mf techniques use really bad transistor sizes, and also controller chips and electronics in general have gotten MUCH faster overall in the past 15 years or so.

So yeah. The kindle's hardware is way overkill for browsing the web quickly, or reading books.

[Stonecold]

The Kindle's powerful CPU is for GSM (which takes much more processing power than cable), audio, creating detailed log files and especially indexing e-books, searching those e-books, AZW2 application programs, TTS etc. But I do agree that a Freescale 532 MHz ARM11 CPU is a bit overkill. Kindle should have a variable clock rate to save power when it's not in use. And here's an interesting fact: Kindle 2 had a graphics chip capable of high-speed screen updates (2048 x 1536 at 50+ Hz). The only limitation is the e-ink screen itself. Now that's overkill!

[Tiersten]

The Kindle CPU has nothing at all to do with the GSM stack. The GSM module has its own baseband processor which runs the GSM stack. This separation of an applications processor and a baseband processor is common for phones for various technical reasons even though it will cost more money. Are you going to now dazzle us with your knowledge of GSM?

[Stonecold]

You're probably right. I don't know much about GSM, nor do I want to give that impression.

[joblack]

Originally Posted by curstpriest

Also realize with technology THIS OLD the mf techniques use really bad transistor sizes, and also controller chips and electronics in general have gotten MUCH faster overall in the past 15 years or so.

So yeah. The kindle's hardware is way overkill for browsing the web quickly, or reading books.

Can't compare that. The Mac has virtual memory which the Kindle doesn't have. I'm sure you could enable it (by compiling a new kernel) so it would work for the Kindle as well. That worked for the Irex Iliad.

Perhaps you could even enable virtual memory without a new kernel. Still didn't need it before but it could be an option.

[Tiersten]

As you appear to be extremely eager to learn, the reasons as to why there is a separation of an application processor and a baseband processor is due to several technical reasons.

The baseband processor runs the radio interface and actually does the raw signalling necessary to talk to the cell towers and the rest of the network. This means that it has very tight requirements for timing. You can't stop the process handling the radio for a few milliseconds to do something else like decode your MP3s as you could be missing a transmission for yourself.

The programming requirements to be able to guarantee the timing of the baseband processor software means that you need something called a realtime OS. This will guarantee that your software will get a defined minimum amount of CPU time and that it will be reliable in scheduling. It will happen every 0.1 seconds precisely or whatever you set it to be.

The system of having two processors thus allows you to run whatever you want on the applications processor without worrying about affecting the radio whilst keeping the baseband processor dedicated to solely handling the radio and other important interfaces. The processing requirements for the two types of processor will be different as well. You want good general purpose computation abilities on the application processor so something like the Freescale iMX whilst you want very good number crunching abilities on the baseband processor so they tend to be DSPs or be a CPU with a DSP core.

There are some low end budget cell phones out there now which have combined the roles of the application and baseband processors. This means the realtime OS is significantly more complicated as it has more to deal with but the barriers they needed to overcome that is something you'll have to look up yourself as that is out of the scope of a post to this forum.

That concludes the rough guide to everything you didn't actually need to know about radio hardware :P

[Tiersten]

Originally Posted by joblack

Can't compare that. The Mac has virtual memory which the Kindle doesn't have. I'm sure you could enable it (by compiling a new kernel) so it would work for the Kindle as well. That worked for the Irex Iliad.

Perhaps you could even enable virtual memory without a new kernel. Still didn't need it before but it could be an option.

You should be able to enable swap on the Kindle without altering the kernel. I don't believe they've disabled or modified it. I'm not sure it'd be a good idea though as the flash inside the Kindle is non replaceable.

[Stonecold]

Thank you for the information. I'm learning something new every day!

[curstpriest]

Originally Posted by joblack

Can't compare that. The Mac has virtual memory which the Kindle doesn't have. I'm sure you could enable it (by compiling a new kernel) so it would work for the Kindle as well. That worked for the Irex Iliad.

Perhaps you could even enable virtual memory without a new kernel. Still didn't need it before but it could be an option.

I thought I mentioned VM was off, guess I edited it out. Anyways, I never used VM on my mac, never ran more than 2 or so apps. You had to manually enable it in the control panel back then (used valuable disk space!) or if you were a pro, you bought the ram doubler extension for like 100$!


don't even tell me you don't remember this.

[joblack]

Originally Posted by curstpriest

I thought I mentioned VM was off, guess I edited it out. Anyways, I never used VM on my mac, never ran more than 2 or so apps. You had to manually enable it in the control panel back then (used valuable disk space!) or if you were a pro, you bought the ram doubler extension for like 100$!


don't even tell me you don't remember this.

Never had a mac but I know that at least the PowerPc CPUs are supporting virtual memory (and as far as I know the latter 68xxx as well).

Of coursed I remember that times. In these times not every n00b had a PC and if you bragged you know how it works you usually did.

Today every halb-imp-n00b can say he is a computer expert just because he can use a Mac or Windows ^^ ... ahhh good old times.