Is a z80 processor going to be enough for driving a color screen? Or will we see some not-shitty screen drivers (at last :O)? I wonder how fast the processor is going to be...

I have asked for the frequency, but I'm not sure I'll get an answer

is an ez80 also considered a z80? since that can run at 50 MHz.

Oh. Well in that case maybe they use 2 Z80s?

So the screen driver is what processes stuff on the screen? I just don't see how a 15 MHz z80 will be able to produce a decent framerate with such a large screen. The TI-84 C  screen is 200 times more data to transfer than the TI-84 Plus SE LCD. The only way they can achieve it is by optimizing to death and only update the necessary parts of the screen at once (for example if the cursor is moved around). But how slow will RecallPic get?

A screen driver is similar to a graphics card, just a little slower :p

Here's my professional opinion: A Z80 is certainly fast enough to handle simple color graphics. The biggest bottleneck in current Z80-series games is the LCD interface. The worst feature is the need to wait several clock cycles after every write. It's just long enough to be a major bottle neck, but not long enough to do anything really useful. However, even if the new driver requires no wait states, a larger screen will still take a lot more CPU power to draw graphics for. The lack of wait states could well be completely offset by the need to compute more graphics data. We'll really need to pray for 25 MHz speed.

How the driver implements color access will have an effect on speed. If it's one nibble per pixel, then graphics access will still be slightly awkward. Unfortunately, any higher resolution precludes a fully memory-mapped solution. The Z80 can directly access up to 65536 bytes of memory, but a 320x240 display has 76800 pixels. Chances are, we'll still have to deal with an LCD driver, and we definitely won't be able to make ready use of a back-buffer for graphics. However, if the LCD driver requires no wait-states, it may actually be an advantage: the LCD driver can handle the multiplication to calculate RAM addresses for us.

We also must wonder whether there will be emulation for the old LCD driver.

Edit: Let me just clarify: If TI optimizes their code (e.g. no wait states, less LCD updating, plotting for every other x, better floating-point routines) and raises the CPU speed, they could still get a reasonable graphing speed. However, a 320x240 display has more than ten times as many pixels as the current 96x64 display, so games may have a tough time drawing full-resolution graphics in real-time.

Another point to consider is how TI will be adding more memory. TI can easily add more memory without significantly reducing profit-margins, but they can't add more flash memory in a manner that current software will be able to access without changes. There is no more room in the memory map for more flash memory, but they could easily add up to 2 MB of RAM. If they want to add more flash, perhaps they will use another set of ports to page the additional memory; or perhaps they will switch to a NAND, and we'll have to contend with reading byte-by-byte from an internal buffer on the NAND; or perhaps they'll completely break the current system.

Here's something bad to consider: as long as they're completely reworking the ASIC, they might as well remove the ability to unlock the boot code. No doubt, with great color comes great restrictions on programmer freedom. But that's why we have people like BrandonW. We are firing up our oscilloscopes! We are reading our disassemblers! Native code! will! be! ours!

But I still think it'll actually turn out to be an Nspire in disguise.

I wonder if they'll use the 16-bit I/O port addresses (with undocumented opcode behavior) to implement the color screen.  Hopefully their ASIC provides full backwards compatibility for ports $10 and $11.

I wonder if they could manage to fix the RAM Clear issue after crashes by storing a backup of the user RAM into a different RAM area, so when the calc is reset, the last backup from when the calc was last turned OFF is restored from there?

Omnicalc already has that feature for TI-83+SEs and TI-84+(SE)s with all 128 K of RAM.