R under Pocket PC

One concern I recall from looking into this a while back (hopefully
not founded) was the issue with floating point handling on the ARMs
and similar PDA CPUs.

This was relevant to the familiar/intimate linux distro's around 18-24
months ago, when I was considering an IPAQ or Zaurus to replace my old
but not dead yet palm.

Thanks to the excellent work of the R developers in keeping all the code
quite standard, and some specific work by Simon Pickering (Bath University),
I have had R working (with graphics) on my Sharp Zaurus for some time.
Sadly, checking today his site is down, but binaries for the Zaurus are
available.

There was a problem with NA handling that needed specifically addressing,
and some missing fonts, but the fpu emulation worked fine. This was using
X11, keypebble and VNC. It could _just about_ run in the standard RAM -
although was a lot happier with extra memory. Most impressive, and well done
Simon (and the R team).

However, a note of caution - presumably due to the lack of a hardware fpu,
and perhaps also the relatively slow access speed of SD ram, benchmarks on
the zaurus ran anything up to (wait for it!) 100 times slower than a pentium
of the same clock speed. This has sadly left R on my Zaurus largely idle, as
in practice I found it just too slow to be usable.

I fear this problem could afflict any handheld implementation, until they
start putting fpu's on these chips.

(PS. I have the same problem with a mini-ITX 'silent PC' - many of these
low-power cpus (eg. Eden) lack hardware FPU. They run many office apps fine,
but when I benchmarked with a stats program, I found it 50 times slower than
a pentium of equivalent clock speed! I am advised that even those that do
have hardware FPU eg. the Nehemiah chip are only 50-60% as fast as a
pentium-class cpu of similar clock speed)