Hello,



After a first flance at our new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition in a previous news, you may have expected the software test ?

Well, no, there would ave been so many things to say and to test on the OS if we want to make something good, that you'll have to wait a little bit, and meanwhile, here's a hardware test ;-)


The motherboard reveals an architecture based around 2 main chips, very usual on the latest TI-82 Stats, TI-83 Plus et TI-84:

• the ASIC
• The Flash ROM memory

As supposed, the Flash ROM memory is a MX29LV320ETTI-70G from MXIO, with a capacity of 4MB !
Once the OS installed, 3.5MB of archive memory is coherent. The size of the OS would be similar to the 84+'s one.
We have already met this manufacturer recently with the external Flash-NOR chip in the prototype TI-Nspire Color.



But the most important with a historical evolution, it's the ASIC, the chip that contains the processor and the RAM!


Nothing comes to mind ?
Let's clean its surface:


The ASIC chip is TI-REF 84PLUSB/TA3! :~o
We are talking about the 4x36 ping ASIC chip that equips the TI-84 Plus with HW rev. G and below, as explained in a previous news, and that featured 128KB of RAM!
On the TI-84 Plus with HW rev. H and later, which is the majority of them right now and those on the 84 Pocket, TI used an ASIC called TI-84PLCR/TA1, smaller with  4x25 pins, but which only featured 48KB of RAM. :(




Even if it hasn't been tested yet, we can bet on having 128KB of RAM for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, and a 15MHz z80 processor.


Having 128KB of RAM is a great news for resources-hungry apps developers (which will be even more with the color....)

The use of the same ASIC chip that on the old 84+ is probably a very good omen for the updates of actual TI-z80 emulators



Let's just hope that the supposed 15MHz will be enough to handle a display color depth of 8 or 16-bits, requiring 4 to 8 times more processing power on screen output operations.

But for the 128KB of RAM, a big thanks to TI which not only proved listening its users asking for it for years, but also by making, I think, an ambitious choice towards the future, opening the gates to a number of community programs and applications that will make this model a success !



Source:
http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11268&lang=en

Is it 100% guaranteed to be 15 MHz with 128 KB of RAM or are there very slim possibilities that it might be more powerful? The 128 KB of RAM is pretty nice for ASM (and eventually Axe/Grammer?) coders since it makes it as easy to store screen buffers, but I am concerned that some things will be much slower due to the lack of processor improvement. (Hopefully not as brutal as the PRIZM, though)

TI has never published the processor speed/kind for their older models as far as I know, so I doubt they will. They might say if it's 2.5 times faster, but since the new calc is slower, I doubt they'll advertise the fact that it's slower.

That is cool to hear. I'm glad it's still a similar processor, although I still hope that the speed won't make good ASM and BASIC games impossible.

Nope, "normal rate" there is about 6.3MHz.

Ahhh!  Why upgrade the screen and put in a slower processor?  Hopefully we will be able to overclock.  That would be kinda cool.  A new challenge for the calculator community to overcome.

Do we have any idea how the lcd driver works yet? Like if there's still a 10us delay? The z80's that I have (manufactured in the mid 80's) start to do weird things when I clock them past 20Mhz. If the ASIC still works the same, I can get my calc to go from 15.6Mhz to 16.2Mhz by disabling the memory delays.

Maybe it's the same LCD and driver as the TI-Nspire CX?