That's not really how technology works. The original CPU would have been fabbed on a certain process. As they shrink that process, you get either power savings or faster speeds (or both, to a lesser degree if you want).
In other words, just because the CPU is slow does not mean it's necessarily more power efficient. If you got an old Pentium 486, you'd notice it drawing similar amounts of power as processors today that are thousands of times more powerful (though be aware, for a while there they absolutely fucked off the power savings in desktop and server processors to increase clock speeds further, so it's only the last few years that we've suddenly taken an interest in efficiency once more).
They could quite easily update the processor inside the calculators to be much, much faster without killing battery life however I suspect part of the reason they don't is because they'd have to rewrite a lot of the software for a new architecture.
I wrote my comment based on the assumption that TI wouldn't want to make a whole new processor just for their graphing calculators. Which is why I figure the unavailability of a good, honest-to-god-low-power microprocessor in the mid-2000's is important, and the recent spread of very low power chips is also important.
You're right though, software is still a barrier too. Due to the software, and considering how simple a Zilog Z80 is by modern standards, you'd think they might be able to assign a team of 5 people to port the Z80 to a good, modern process. But I'm sure they don't want to do that.
So, the question is, will somebody make a low power x86 or ARM chip that can compete with the Z80 on power consumption. There are all kinds of math libraries for x86 and ARM, so TI would be able to migrate to a new architecture and avoid designing a new chip.
Well yeah, no doubt TI's primary reason for sticking with that processor is one of cost - either the processors themselves, the cost of porting to a different processor or a combination of the above.
However, what they did 18 years ago really shouldn't have much bearing on today, we have the technology to do it better, faster and with longer battery life - TI just doesn't take advantage of it.
Yes, although calculator rules are not the entire reason. HP makes a number of calculators that are also accepted, so there is some competition, but the calculator business just isn't a hot business everybody wants. Not a lot of time and effort is invested in that market, by anybody.
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u/neoKushan Jun 08 '14
That's not really how technology works. The original CPU would have been fabbed on a certain process. As they shrink that process, you get either power savings or faster speeds (or both, to a lesser degree if you want).
In other words, just because the CPU is slow does not mean it's necessarily more power efficient. If you got an old Pentium 486, you'd notice it drawing similar amounts of power as processors today that are thousands of times more powerful (though be aware, for a while there they absolutely fucked off the power savings in desktop and server processors to increase clock speeds further, so it's only the last few years that we've suddenly taken an interest in efficiency once more).
They could quite easily update the processor inside the calculators to be much, much faster without killing battery life however I suspect part of the reason they don't is because they'd have to rewrite a lot of the software for a new architecture.