Re: New gcc

[Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com>]

Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com> writes:

> The big difference of the StrongARM over older generations of the ARM
> chips was primarily the addition of extra cache and some other
> internal stuff plus a higher clock rate.  There was a good application
> note on the Acorn website about the differences, but their site seems
> to be down.

The Acorn site is up now.  Here's the note:

 http://www.acorn.com/cgi-bin/appnote/appnote.pl?TextFile=291-305/295/

 Significant StrongARM features 
    * 202MHz core clock 
    * 5-stage pipeline (Fetch, Issue, Execute, Buffer, Write) 
    * Separate 16K write-back data cache and 16K instruction cache 
    * 8 entry write buffer, each entry holding 1-16 bytes 
    * Fast 32 and 64 bit result multiply instructions 
    * Averages fewer cycles per instruction than previous ARMs 

So the key difference is that it's just a faster all-around chip.

Cheers,

 - Jim