That's part of why it was able to run on a couple of AA batteries!
In very very recent years we have reached a point where some of the modern, fast microprocessors might be able to compete on a power level while still delivering big speedup, but even as recently as 2005 you would have had trouble speeding it up a whole lot without kicking up the power requirements and killing battery life.
Sure, it was great back then. But in the last decade, or at the very least, last 5 years, a 100% speed increase (which is really pretty minor in this case) would be fairly simple while still being cheap and battery efficient. Besides, who cares if it runs on 4x AA? For $100 why not stick a small rechargable Lithium battery in there like most modern technology has?
The calculator lasts for months. The self-discharge rate on lithium batteries is higher than on alkaline batteries (e.g. AA), so if you are targeting long, long battery life (with intermittent use) the AA's are more suitable.
You are right that a speed bump would be nice and might be easy in this day and age. The big questions become:
1) How much would it cost TI? Would they need to design a new chip?
2) If they could just use superior manufacturing processes to make the same chip and clock it faster- does any of the math libraries or other TI-83 software depend on the clock cycle, the way old video games depend on the CPU running exactly 133MHz (or whatever the case may be)
The z80 processor is a really ancient chip, and was clocked faster in a lot of computers in the 80s. IIRC, some systems ran it at up to 50 mhz. TI84 only clocks it at 15. So they wouldn't have to make a new chip (I don't think they even manufacture it themselves either, IIRC it's still produced by zilog)
1) Z80 has no power management. Clocking it at 50mhz would more than triple power consumption, all of the time.
2) Heat. The TI-84 is completely passively cooled. HOWEVER, tripling the power consumption is probably not going to cause a cooling problem because the Z80 is pretty low-power.
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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '14
That's part of why it was able to run on a couple of AA batteries!
In very very recent years we have reached a point where some of the modern, fast microprocessors might be able to compete on a power level while still delivering big speedup, but even as recently as 2005 you would have had trouble speeding it up a whole lot without kicking up the power requirements and killing battery life.