42th anniversary of HP-35?

[Gerald H]

(06-22-2014 07:19 PM)Mike Morrow Wrote:  

(06-22-2014 05:03 PM)HP67 Wrote:  An anniversary 42S? Yes! Running on ARM? No thanks.

There's nothing inherently wrong with an ARM-based calculator. What is very wrong with most attempts is using the original firmware of some legacy model on an emulation of the original hardware on an ARM. The emulation layer ruins the result, not the ARM.

The flaws of the HP-15C Limited Edition stem directly from emulation of the original HP-15C hardware on real ARM hardware. Emulation results in gross wastes of run time and battery power to support those run times, compared to the same ARM-platform with firmware native. The HP 30b runs on an ARM with native firmware. It calculates a 2500-iteration Savage benchmark in 6 seconds producing a 12-digit result of very good accuracy. In comparison, the HP-15C LE runs on an ARM with a clock speed very similar to the HP 30b, but it uses old firmware and an emulation layer. The same benchmark takes 48 seconds to produce a 10-digit result of far lower accuracy. Thus, the HP-15C LE takes eight times longer to run and eight times the power consumption to produce a significantly inferior numerical result compared to the HP 30b. Had that same HP-15C LE ARM hardware been executing native firmware, results would doubtless have been very similar to those of the HP 30b.

Speed improvements of the HP 49G+ and HP 50G resulting from introduction of ARM processors are minimal, due to the Saturn emulator layer that runs on the ARM. It would be lightening-fast without an emulation layer.

Hear! Hear! & just for this reason my favourite calculator is the HP 49G.