Curiosity about the hardware in my DS

[Prosthetic_mind]

Just a curiosity, I got a Nintendo DS on my birthday in February, and am curious about the specs. I've looked up the specs and know the basics, but I'm curious prodominantly of the processors. I'm curious about the ARM9 and ARM7 line of chips, their general uses, and their capabilities. I can understand it if people are not familiar, because this really isn't a major PC issue, but my curiosity is piqued.

[saphalline]

Ah yes, the ARM CPU's. Very interesting architecture...

Originally designed as an extremely low-power simple RISC-based sub-microprocessor, the architecture has been gaining momentum as the CPU design of choice for embedded applications and devices. Many computerized household appliances like microwaves have an ARM-based CPU in them.

With later versions of ARM (I believe ARM5 or ARM6) FPU support was added making it a full-fledged CPU design capable of any task. Low power consumption continues to be the main point of ARM, although the variants known as StrongARM inside a few PDA's and Palm's were specifically designed for high clock speeds to increase their performance.

Versatility has continued to be added to the unique ARM architecture, thus inbuing it with many modern advancements so that it could take on the Nintendo DS. While ARM lacks the pure programmability that we enjoy on PC's with CISC-based x86 & PowerPC architectures, RISC is still alive and well in ARM and the efficiency factor is still huge with small battery-powered devices.