Freescale DragonBall
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- This article is about a computer chip. For the manga and TV series, see Dragon Ball.
Motorola/Freescale Semiconductor's DragonBall is a microprocessor design based on the famous 68000 core, but implemented as an all-in-one low-power solution for handheld computer use. It was designed by Motorola based in Hong Kong.
The DragonBall's only major design win was in earlier versions of the Palm Computing platform; from Palm OS 5 on it has been superseded by ARM-based XScale processors from Intel. The processor is also used in some of the AlphaSmart line of portable word processors. Examples include the Dana and Dana Wireless.
The processor is capable of speeds of up to 16.67 MHz and can run up to 2.7 MIPS (million instructions per second), for the base and EZ model. It was extended to 37 MHz, 3.5 MIPS for the VZ model, and 66 MHz, 10.8 MIPS for Super VZ.
It is a 16-bit processor with 32-bit internal and external address bus (24-bit external address bus for EZ and VZ variants). It has many built-in functions, like a color and grayscale display controller, PC speaker sound, serial port with UART and IRDA support, UART bootstrap, real time clock, is able to directly access DRAM, Flash ROM, and mask ROM, and has built-in support for touch screens.
It is an all-in-one computer on a chip; before the dragonballEZ, Palm handhelds had twice as many ICs (integrated circuits).
| List of Motorola/Freescale microprocessors | |
|---|---|
| The 6800 family : | 6809 (see also: Hitachi 6309) |
| 68000 family : | 68000 | 68008 | 68010 | 68012 | 68020 | 68030 | 68040 | 68060 | ColdFire | DragonBall |
| Pre-PowerPC RISC : | 88000 |
| Floating-point coprocessors : | 68881, 68882 |
| PowerPC family (as part of AIM) : | PPC 7XX range (aka "PowerPC G3") | PPC 7XXX range (aka "PowerPC G4") |
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