“On this day ten years ago, the first prototype StrongARM processor card was powered up by Acorn engineers. The experimental kit managed to run at a cool 228MHz, running software nearly six times faster than the 40MHz ARM710 processors used in RiscPCs at the time. The card, which drew one watt of power, would later go on sale in September 1996.”
Not bad at all. If someone made an ARM or MIPS laptop today, we could possibly see 10+ hours of battery life.
<p>Way cooler than having a 3 GHZ CPU in my book.</p>
Probably not. With current laptops, the CPU uses less than 30% of the power of the mcahine. Even if the CPU used 0 watts, a laptop would only go from (say) 3 hours to 4 hours. To hit 10 hours, you’d need to reduce power useage by about a factor of three across the board.
Edited 2006-03-27 22:41
30% is still a lot, compared to what? 5%? I don’t know how much the HD and the screen consume tbh. Still: an extra hour or two of batterylife wouldn’t be bad
Don’t forget, with such low consumption, you could go mad on multi-core/CPU, and a laptop with 4 ARM CPU’s (running Linux) would score definite geekpoints.
I’ve always thought it’d be a good idea:
– ARM (or other low-power) CPU
– Solid state HD.
– … do something about the screen. Most of that is still in development.
Battery life and heat are the only things that matter to me in a notebook. A PDA has all the processing power I need. If the keyboard and screen were bigger, I could go with a PDA.
Ah, but then it wouldn’t be a PDA 🙂
Interesting, but around the time better screens are developed that suck up less battery, we’ll have far more advanced low-wattage CPUs and much higher capacity flash memory. I sure hope someone actually puts those components together rather than making another desktop replacement.
> Ah, but then it wouldn’t be a PDA 🙂
You’re describing the Zaurus in many ways. Well, a scaled up one at any rate.
The Psion Netbook/Series 7 was fairly laptop like and IIRC used an ARM processor. Ran EPOCH though.
Also, there was a few of a rather notebookish Windows CE H/PC devices, such as NEC MobilePro 800.
I’ve always thought it’d be a good idea:
– ARM (or other low-power) CPU
– Solid state HD.
– … do something about the screen. Most of that is still in development.
Battery life and heat are the only things that matter to me in a notebook. A PDA has all the processing power I need. If the keyboard and screen were bigger, I could go with a PDA.
Hmm, too bad solid state hd is expensive, about 50x as expensive as normal HDs. But imagine a notebook with 3 GB of flashdrive for storing the OS, and then some volatile solid state memory for storing the swap-file, and multiple ARM-CPUs (using a HD only for large applications and data). That thing would blaze and be low-battery.
I’ve always thought it’d be a good idea:
– ARM (or other low-power) CPU
– Solid state HD.
– … do something about the screen. Most of that is still in development.
A Nokia 770 with large memory card is basicly what you describe. Too bad that they have ruined the whole thing by basing it on the very resource hungry Gtk+ library.
Well, you’d have to do more than just change the CPU. PDA-style LCDs that don’t use power unless a pixel changes state, plus flash instead of hard drives, etc.
It could be done.
Like OLED or similiar? would be nice.
Passive Matrix LCD isn’t feasible for large screens apparently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCD#Passive-matrix_and_active-matrix
PHOLED however…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHOLED
..looks very interesting
They did actually sell an Acorn laptop – my old music teacher had one, the battery life was pretty good; applications you needed resided in rom, fast boot and shutdown, heck, even had a PC emulator for basic dos and Windows 3.1 applications.
yes, it was the Acorn A4 laptop.
http://old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=31&st=1
I have a riscpc 700 that I need to get running again. very nice machines.
about multitasking…
The risc os was and still is cooperative multitasking. Not preemptive like most every other OS out there.
Consider what a tiny little company Acorn were, even when they were at their most successful they were tiny compared with companies like Apple. Yet they managed to design CPUs that were ahead of their time, write a very elegant OS, and release a range of great home computers.
Their computers weren’t even that expensive, IIRC you could buy a much faster Acorn Archimedes for less than a crippled Mac Classic. At the time the OS offered better multitasking, memory management and stability than Mac OS, for example you could copy files in the background. In my opinion it also had a better GUI which offered pervasive drag and drop, pop-up menus, anti-aliased text and solid window dragging/resizing.
I’ll never understand why they were ignored by the general public, it was a very sad day for the computer industry when Acorn left it.
> Consider what a tiny little company Acorn were, even
> when they were at their most successful they were
> tiny compared with companies like Apple. Yet they
> managed to design CPUs that were ahead of their
> time, write a very elegant OS, and release a range
> of great home computers.
That would be Roger/Sophie Wilson. The thing you have to remember about the UK micro market in the early/mid ’80’s was that the guys were mostly Cambridge graduates in EE and such. If they had been in the US they would have been at MIT or whatever. They would have been snapped up by Apple or HP or similar. In the UK there wasn’t really that kind of industry, so they mostly went it alone.
As for the popularity – captive market. Acorn ruled the education market till the mid 1990’s. Almost all schools used BBC Micro’s (their 8-bit model) and then all moved on to Archiemedes. Indeed, when I was at 6th form college, we used Archie’s for our CS A-Level.
When Acorn attempted to enter the consumer market (with the A3010 and A3020 if memory serves me correctly) they died a death. No one cared, no one bought the machines. All the kids wanter Amiga and ST, coz lets face it, Acorn games sucked. The few I played (Lemmings, Elite, Pacmania and a few others) were well executed, but they were overpriced and hard to come by.
> Their computers weren’t even that expensive,
They were fairly expensive. Expensive enough to be out of the pocket of most consumers. Hence the Electron and the failed consumer A3XXX range. The Previous Archimedes machines required a monitor, so the price got hiked up that way.
> IIRC you could buy a much faster Acorn Archimedes for less than a
> crippled Mac Classic. At the time the OS offered better
> multitasking, memory management and stability than Mac OS, for
Debatable. The OS was not pre-emptive like AmigaOS. A bad app could still lock up the machine. The Acorn RiscOS was cooperative IIRC, at least in 2.00 it was.
> example you could copy files in the background. In my opinion it
> also had a better GUI which offered pervasive drag and drop,
> pop-up menus, anti-aliased text and solid window
> dragging/resizing.
Hmmm. GUI was horrid. Much prefered the Amiga at the time. The Task bar at the bottom of the screen quickly gets cluttered and unmanagable.
Drag and drop – the Mac had that first, and the whole “drap to save” thing was extremely unintuitive.
> I’ll never understand why they were ignored by the general
> public, it was a very sad day for the computer industry when
> Acorn left it.
Because, and this ultimately was their downfall, all the cool kids had Spectrum’s and then Amiga’s, all the unititiated got C64’s and then ST’s, all the geeks and social outcasts had an Acorn. Kids didn;t like being made to use computers for school work back then, and an Acorn computer was one step from doing school work unfortunately.
Edited 2006-03-28 10:33
It’s funny to bring up the Amiga, though. Ignoring the “cool kids” study in sociology/anthropology (summary: let’s buy a Spectrum because all the cool games run on it, even though the only similarity between the packaging/promotion and the product is the logo, which is green on black and takes up half the screen during the game), and looking at the technical stuff, both 32-bit Acorn and Amiga made some architecture choices that were outmanoeuvred by subsequent technological development.
Acorn had a pretty good chipset, but they never *seriously* tried to pursue a strategy involving customers running a post-microcomputer operating system on it. Thus, the cooperative multitasking (looking good against a pre-2000 Mac or pre-1995 PC, but bad against everything else and everything since) and incomplete memory protection soon started to weigh heavily on its chances. The Amiga had a nice preemptive multitasking OS but incomplete memory protection and a graphics system that soon became obsolete (planar graphics and sprites were good in the 1980s, not so good in the 1990s).
Aside from the lack of killer apps, in the end, both systems probably met their demise because the technology roadmap didn’t go anywhere: Internet applications require better multitasking than RISC OS has; in a world where CGA/EGA/VGA/SVGA were becoming mere memories, the Amiga desperately needed a more mainstream graphics roadmap.
So the “cool kids” really didn’t have that much to say about it in the end. Remember: the big games-fuelled microcomputer orgy ended in the mid-1980s, and by the time Commodore went bankrupt the “cool kids” were probably playing Sonic the Hedgehog on their Megadrive or saving up for that new-fangled PlayStation thing.
I’m sure I read somewhere that the original ARM could run off the signal lines without needing a power line put to it.
Sounds bizarre and implausible and I might be misremembering or remembering nonsense.