The Icon Bar currently has a few responses to the recent buyout of RISC OS from Pace by Castle Tech.
Responses to RISC OS buyout
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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As has http://www.drobe.co.uk.
Yes, about 60 more comments, as opposed to the ‘3’ on iconbar. all fuzzy, that.
There are several more comments in the various threads in The Icon Bar forums.
Is it still tied to Acorn hardware or is it able to run elsewhere aswell now?
Am I even thinking of the right OS? 🙂
While you’re not technically correct about Acorn hardware (in that Acorn don’t make the hardware anymore, a few other companies do), it’s tied to the same Architecture still – more or less. See http://www.iyonix.com for one particular example of the (still disproportionately expensive) hardware. It’s now possible to build your own PC capable of RISC OS (there’s a very small selection of ATX form factor motherboards of the requisite architecture), though that too proves rather expensive. Nice platform. Shame about the price. Catch 22, really.
Ahem, no.
Iyonix is substantially different from earlier RISC OS machines. It uses a version of the OS that has hardware abstraction, uses PCI (32 and 64 bit at up to 66MHz), an nVidia PC video card, PC sound card, UDMA and USB.
The xScale (IOP80321) is clocked substantially faster than the old RISC PC, not an IOMD or VIDC in sight (in fact the only remains of the old architecture is Podule bus which has been uprated and is there to support older non-PCI cards).
A lot of work has been done on Iyonix, and to simply dismiss it as being little different from the earlier (10 year old) machines is a bit unkind.
Although it costs a lot, allowing for inflation it is still probably cheaper than the original RISC PC when it came out in 1994. Given the size of the current market economy of scales don’t really operate (yet….)
For people wanting to “muck” around with ARM/Intel xScale technology it’s not a bad starting point (and is a lot cheaper than many less capable development boards).
I’d also point out that there is an active project porting Linux, and Castle Technologies have just published the Technical Reference Manual (TRM) for Iyonix – so there are many developments afoot (take a glance at drobe (www.drobe.co.uk) for details).
Kind Regards
Annraoi
Yes, there have been a lot of changes under the hood, and yes the system is a shedload faster and abstracted better. RISC OS 5 is 32-bit-clean, whereas 4 and below rely on the 26-bit addressing mode of the older ARM CPUs. The fact remains, though, and this was the point I was trying to make – that RISC OS will only run on ARM-based systems, and that RISC OS-capable machines are horrifically expensive for the amount of power you get compared to more mainstream architectures. Yes, the increase in power is disproportionate to the change in cost over the years – for the better, but back then the Archimedes was a better overall platform and you paid for it. Now, it’s not a leader anymore. For 200 pounds you can buy a well-specced Athlon XP 2200+ based machine, for five times that you can just about pick up an Iyonix which doesn’t have close to the processing power. ARM-based systems aren’t mainstream, and you have to pay for that, sadly – making it a highly unattractive proposition for new potential enthusiasts.
True the Iyonix *is* expensive, but how could it *not* be so given the size of the market. If PC’s sold in the same numbers they’d be expensive too…. in fact as so many PC’s have been sold – why do THEY cost so much.
As to performance, yes the processor is not exactly compeditative – that having been said lumber an Athlon with Windows and compare it to the efficiency of RISC OS and you’d find that the difference is not quite that marked.
I’d also point out that for someone interested in getting to grips with the ARM (and it is integrated into just about everything these days) Iyonix is probably a fair way to go.
There’s also a wealth of expertise in the Acorn newsgroups and on sites like drobe or iconbar, thanks to Iyonix the whole scene is a fair bit healthier than it was.
Yes ARM machines are not mainstream – but then in Car terms Ferraris aren’t mainstream either
Regards
Annraoi
Don’t get me wrong, I know the Iyonix is expensive for a reason – and that reason is largely unavoidable – I was just lamenting the fact, really. Comparing an Athlon running Windows with an Iyonix running RISC OS probably is a fair comparison – the OS scales to the capabilities of the hardware. But don’t get me started on that, it’s a whole other argument (you should see Windows 3.1 on an Athlon – it flies!) 🙂
The overwhelming usage of ARM CPUs nowadays is for low-power devices. As such, the reason why the fastest ones available are 600 to 700MHz is because their market is for low-power devices. Intel has demoed faster ARM chip samples years ago, but they’ve still not been put into production. An Intel executive has been quoted saying that they could put out a 2 to 3GHz ARM CPU if they wanted to. But it is not financially practical because to do so because its selling point is its power usage & not speed. A 3GHz XScale with FPU, 800MHz FSB & 1mb of onboard cache would easily chew up any x86 system, use several watts of electricity, and probably not even need a cooling fan.
Releasing a 3GHz ARM CPU wouldn’t make financial sense for Intel. They’d probably only sell an unprofitable number of units, and it’d only serve to undermine the Itanic in the server space.
Yes Acorn was hopeless about things like marketing, running the front side bus at a decent speed & bothering to put in 16bit sound cards, but some of what they designed was very good.
The main reason why the Iyonix is so expensive is because of all the programming work they had to do on RISC OS to remove all the references to the 26bit mode.
Actually Samsung are introducing a 1.2GHz ARM10 (they call it the HALLA) this year, it uses a shorter pipeline than the xScale (7 rather than 8 stages) – so may well perform even better than the difference in clock rate suggests.
And yes I do recall seeing that article quoting an Intel exec about 3GHz+ xScales, now if only we could persuade Intel that it’s in their longterm interest
Regards
Annraoi