The Treo 680 review – System

The Palm Treo 600 was often ridiculed for its rather weak 144MhZ OMAP processor – and indeed, opening large 8MP files took quite some time. The Treo 680′s 312MhZ PXA27x processor promises more power…but don’t forget NVFS. Is the Treo 680 the powerhouse we want it to be?

Processor
The chart below shows Speedy benchmark values for Treo 680 and 600:

The detailed results are here:

A PalmPi benchmark run takes about 4.17 seconds on a Treo 680, a Treo 600 takes 8.18. Visit our PalmPi review for more comparison numbers…

Expansion memory
The two Treos scored very identical in CardSpeed’s writing speed tests. The reading speed was far higher on the Treo 680 – it probably has a faster CPU and system bus(Treo 680 writes about 3MB/sec, while the 600 maxes out at about 600k/sec):

Treo 680:Good
Write32bits:76
Write32k:113482
Read32k:2912711

Treo 600:Good
Write32bits:72
Write32k:91980
Read32k:582542

-all values in bps

RAM layout
The Treo 600 has a classic memory system consisting of volatile RAM. A Resco Explorer “memory map” for the Treo 600 is shown below:

The Treo 680, on the other hand, has a NVFS flash system. This means that no data is lost when the battery gets removed(soft reset), but leads to a slight speed penalty when opening applications or files for the first time. Palm beefed up the size of the caches, leading to the impressive numbers shown below:

Overall, the Treo 680 is fast enough for all tasks thrown at it so far. I can ‘t say that it lagged on me yet. The increased dynamic memory allows you to run apps like PalmPDF or Doom without UDMH, the bigger DB cache speeds up launching applications…

Related posts:

1. Fossil Abacus WristPDA Review part 2 – WristPDA benchmarks
2. The Aceeca Meazura review – system hardware
3. SpeedDial for Treo – the review
4. The Hama 2GB SD memory card review
5. Overclocking a Treo 680 – LightSpeed 3.0