The A9home is officially on sale to the public with the first orders expected to ship by next month. The published specification says the A9home is just 168mm by 103mm by53mm (roughly 6″ x 4″ x 2″) in size. Inside its blue aluminum case is a 400MHz Samsung ARM9 processor with a Silicon Motion chipset, a 40GB hard disc, 128MB of SDRAM and 8MB of video RAM. The operating system is 32bit RISC OS Adjust, and the box runs off a 5 volt 20W power supply. It features four USB 1.1 ports, 2 PS/2 sockets, an ethernet network port, and an audio out socket.
For the embeded space where size matters, I suppose. 1100$ USD buys a lot of whitebox PC.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to see more RISC OS hardware available and I love tiny, energy efficient computers like this, but I have to wonder how many they can possibly sell.
Considering the competition from the Iyonix there can’t be a huge number of potential customers in the rather limited RISC OS market. I can’t see many people spending £600 just to try it out if they aren’t existing RISC OS fans.
Is there a potential market for this computer that I’m missing?
Dave_K wrote
Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to see more RISC OS hardware available and I love tiny, energy efficient computers like this, but I have to wonder how many they can possibly sell.
The energy efficiency’s goal is to save money. This product is already not ‘money efficient’
.
From article:
One interesting aspect is that it has no floppy or CD drive built in – users will have to either install software and copy files from a network or plug in a USB connected drive.
OMG, don’t ever say lack of something ‘interesting’. MiniMac has DVD burner built in, with half price of this machine!
I think it’s a shame they didn’t turn this into a laptop. Considering how compact it is that wouldn’t be such a difficult job. At the moment a Wintel notebook running an emulator is the nearest thing to a modern RISC OS laptop.
I imagine it would have pretty impressive battery life considering the low power consumption. Who knows, maybe there’s an untapped market for an ARM based laptop, for embedded software development if nothing else.
The energy efficiency’s goal is to save money. This product is already not ‘money efficient’
.
Who on earth cares about saving a dollar or two? I care about the quality of the air I breathe, and the water level in the local dutch polders (global warming->melting icecaps-> flooded homecountry) a lot more, thank you very much.
What are the advantages about risc os or the hardware? Do they use less power than the x86 counterpart? Are they more efficient?
The product looks nice. But they should seriously work in bringing the price down. Else there won’t be any takers.
Edited 2006-05-07 04:40
The only amount I would spend on a machine like this would be under 400 CDN, far out of field for me and most others.
For a link to actual price info:
http://www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/prices/categories/computers.shtml…
1. Is it going to be easily available in the U.S.?
2. Define: punter.
2. british equivalent of a prostitute’s “john”
Interesting that the article used it so much. Seperated by a common language I guess.
Punter is generally used to mean the “paying public” (well here in ireland anyways) as in there was “100,000 punters at Lady’s Day during Galway Races last year” etc.
So yeah it can be used for to define a “john” but for alot more as well.
The specs are about as mediocre as you could build for if it were a PC that is. I am sure the SFF case and 20W power are nice but really a nice MiniMac could be had for this price. Is RISC OS so good that even this board would run it well? I could see some engineers buying this sort of kit for doing embedded Arm work.
I haven’t seen a 40G HD for awhile, 128M of ram seems puny, USB1.1 only is (spin the adjective wheel) ….. I reckon HDs are now $30/100G in my retail outlets so thats $12 of HD. 128M ram is not much different.
“They wanted to keep the price well below 1000 quid”
Thanks but no thanks even at 600 quid.
Ironically on the Simtec website they have some very interesting and much more affordeable micro modules and dev boards for the Arm and uCLinux hobbyists, developers starting at 27quid.
http://www.simtec.co.uk/products/boards.html
The specs are about as mediocre as you could build for if it were a PC that is. I am sure the SFF case and 20W power are nice but really a nice MiniMac could be had for this price. Is RISC OS so good that even this board would run it well?
RISC OS doesn’t need to be good to run on 400 MHz and 128 MB RAM, it just needs to be decent. And that, it appparently is. 400 MHz should be enough for any OS.
Regarding RAM..I read somewhere that ARM processors lead to more ‘intensive’ code, up to 4x as ‘space-efficient’ as Motorola 68k code. Anyone can confirm such a thing?
ARM code can be pretty space efficient due primarily to the design of the instruction set.
Most processor architectures only allow branches to be performed based on the processor’s status flags. Branches are costly for a CPU, since they require refreshing the processor’s pipeline. Of course every branch requires instructions to perform the branch itself, and associated code to manage branching and potentially returning from the branch. Many branches are performed for the sake of only a few instructions.
Modern CPU designs from Intel and AMD contain loads of extra branch prediction hardware to help work around this problem.
The ARM instruction set, in contrast, allows for any instruction to be performed (or not) based on the processors status flags. You can, for example, have a sequence of instructions in your code that will only execute if the “Equals” flag is set – this code gets skipped if the flag is set, acting like No-Op instructions. This means that it is possible in ARM code to avoid performing a load of branches that would be required on other architectures.
IIRC all mathematical instructions on ARM chips can be used to set the processor status registers. This in itself often negates the need to use a specific “compare” instruction, also cutting down on code and processing time. There’s also the MLA instruction (Multiply and Add) which combines what is often two separate instructions on other chips, again helping code efficiency.
Let’s also not forget that the ARM is a RISC design with 15 general purpose registers. As a result there’s no need to shift around data to specific registers in order to perform specific instructions. This too makes ARM code more efficient.
Finally there is also the Thumb instruction set that many ARM chips these days support. The Thumb instruction set covers most of the ARM set in half the number of bits, i.e. 16-bit instructions rather than 32-bit. Thumb code is, as a result, almost twice as space efficient as plain ARM code.
I don’t know how much more space-efficient this makes ARM code compared to 68k – I’d be very surprised if it were as much as 4x, and quite surprised if it even got as high as 2x.
If they threw a media accelerator on that, like what has been done with those hand held devices, you would find that as a ‘media centre’ box, it wouldn’t be half bad.
Too bad its USB 1.1 and no firewire, expansion is pretty much castrated, and really the machine of only any use to those who need very limited computing needs given the specifications.
(I used the generic “connector” on purpose)
Here are more detailed specs:
http://www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/individual/prodpages/ADV-A9H.shtm…
But even here, there is no mention if it has VGS, digital, composite, RGB or what. It has something, because it has 8 MB of video RAM.
The venerable old Archimedes soldiers on with yet another new name. Awesome styling and such though. At about half-to-a-third or it’s current price, it could be quite competitive, as it is, it’s just another modern version of a cult classic computer (see Amiga One) with appeal only the hardest of hardcore system loyalists.