7. There Is No "Intel Inside" CPU, Continued

In Slow mode the clock speed of the CPU core and the two internal bus systems, the advanced host bus and advanced peripheral bus can be reduced to save energy. To lower the speed, an external clock speed signal controls the processor.

In Idle mode, the core clock speed is set at zero while critical system and periphery blocks continue to receive a reduced speed of 67 MHz. Going from Normal into Idle mode, the core voltage is also reduced from 1.3 to 1.0 volts. Both of these functions used to reduce the various clock speeds and to lower the supply voltage help save energy. According to the manufacturer, these measures lower the core's power use by 51% and that of the SoC (system on a chip) by 32%. This power-saving technology is marketed as Dynamic Voltage Scaling.

DVS helps decrease the amount power required by the SoC

So how does this technology helps save electricity? The answer is when the CPU currently has or very little to do. This is the case 80% of the time when playing WMA files. With typical PDA tasks such as offline e-mail reading, a very light CPU workload is about 100% of the time. As this energy-saving technology is fully automated similar to Intel's Wireless Speedstep, users do not have to concern themselves with it at all.

Does Samsung's microcontroller also benefit from the wireless MMX program code propagated by Intel? No, of course not. But since for one there is hardly any wireless MMX-optimized software on the market anymore and wireless MMX code would have to run on the iPAQ rx3715 for compatibility reasons alone for another, it is no reason not to go with this PDA.

In addition, Samsungs microcontroller has a NAND flash memory interface, unlike Intel's products. NAND flash memory is not only faster than NOR flash memory but also significantly less expensive by comparison.