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First Desktop Computer To Use Intel's XScale
Ian Chamberlain writes "Drobe, the leading RISC OS portal, has reported the release of Iyonix, the first desktop computer to use Intel's XScale processor. The XScale is now famous for its increasingly widespread use in PDA devices, used because of its low power consumption and high performance processing. The Iyonix runs a new 32bit version of RISC OS, the operating system orginally developed by Acorn, but now owned by Pace." The same site links to a pair of reviews (one translated from heise.de) of this machine. RISC OS is also what powers the solar PC mentioned a few months ago.
You know the first question 'the public' will have is... "...but does it run Windows?"
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
just goes back to the main /. page. please fix!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Intel's XScale site is here: http://www.intel.com/design/intelxscale/
"All for £1299"
Now I just have to drive God knows how many meters to get to the trade show.
pm
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Ouch. OS in flash ROM is cool, but what are people going to be buying these for? Are there legacy apps in RISC OS that people need to run faster?
I want one, anyway.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Here's the XScale link and the Solar PC link.
and higher processor density. ...now back to the microbox racks...
Karma: Censored (mostly affected by decency laws)
If they can add a built-in touchscreen, a battery, and make it fit in my pocket, I think they have a winner!
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
Get the DMCA on them!!
...if this is supposed to be an alternative OS to Windows, MacOS and Linux. I mean, if it's 1299 UK pounds (about $2000), I can get a MAD Win/Lin/Mac PC for that.
It's a 600Mhz Processor (blah blah Mhz Myth blah blah) so how powerful is that compared to AMD or Intel chips? Benchmarks anyone?
No AGP slot?
Can someone please, other than for RISC OS development, explain to me why I would buy one of these?
vk.
So is the RISC OS so much better than say a KDE, GNOME, Mac or Windoze desktop that makes the higher price of the machine worthwhile, or are these a bunch of nostalgics trying to revive some old memories? I mean, history is littered with nice desktops that never got critical mass. What about applications?
>XScale is now famous for its increasingly widespread
>use in PDA devices, used because of its low power
>consumption and high performance processing.
um... this must explain why my inbox is full of messages from Sean at thekompany.com about how crappy the performance of the new Zaurus is.
Sitting Walrus Blog
Based on the image of the motherboard here this box looks to use a standard ATX-factor motherboard (aside from the "podule" bays and rear port arrangement, anyhow). Anybody know who makes the board, and if they are available separately? I don't think I would pay over 2000 bucks for a whole system, but since it uses pretty typical PC hardware, if the board were available for a reasonable price (even "reasonable" like the $500 for some of the open PPC boards) it would be a cool alternative to the x86 orthodoxy, even if its somewhat slow by modern standards (especially in light of the fact that it should be trivial to get NetBSD and probably Linux running on it).
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
The whole point of the XScale is to save power through voltage scaling. Voltage scaling involves reducing the CPU voltage(and the CPU performance) during tasks that aren't time-critical, and during system idle time. This doesn't make much sense on a desktop machine for two reasons:
1) For desktop systems power is cheap and readily available and
2) For most desktop systems, the CPU consumes a small fraction of the entire system power. Even the fastest P4 uses like 70 watts, where the entire system might consume something like 250-350 watts. So even if we reduced the CPU wattage to zero, we still would only get about a 1/4 or less improvement in overall system power.
So, why put an XScale in a desktop system?? Ideas anyone??
There once was a troll named Buck
Who was really a stupid fuck
He posts as AC
His pants are hot gritty
Man, ACs are always such schmucks!
Don't give me none of this "nature theme" business.
Acorn was a British computer company which was more or less dissolved a couple of years ago.
;)
They designed and released the BBC computer for BBC TV corp. in the early 1980s for their "The Computer" television series. It was like the Commodore 64, only better... Definently the best mass-market desktop computer of the age.
Acorn then moved on to thinking about their next-generation computing system. They found the 80286 and 68000 too slow and expensive for their tastes, and instead did the foolhardy thing of designing their own R.I.S.C. CPU - the ARM (XScale is an evolution of the ARM, like how the P4 is an evolution of the 386). ARM CPUs typically use amazingly small amounts of electricity, and run up to several times faster than an X86 cpu at the same mhz.
In (I think) 1987, after having been bought by Olivetie (an Italian electronics company), Acorn released their first Arm based system. Over the next couple of years, this evolved into the RISC Operating System / ARM computer platform, which was relatively popular, especially in schools, in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, and parts of Canada and Mexico. RISCOS/Arm is virtually unheard of in the US, but it was an important platform once. In 1998 my high school had mainly Acorn computers (and my school in 1996 was still using Acorn BBCs).
Acorn arguabily suffered from mismanagement in the 1990s, and failed to properly market and give direction to their system. The company decided to stop producing Acorn computers in late 1998 (a fast new yellow G4-cube-like computer - the Phoebie was in late development at the time) on the belief that the next big thing would be set-top boxes and the like. Of course they got it all wrong, and Acorn more or less went down the plughole and was subsequently renamed "Element 14" (huh?) which means Silicon, then merged into some forgettable company.
Luckily the ARM-cpu-producing division was held as a seperate company and survived... ARM cpus are widely used in certain areas. Last weekend when I was at a computer shop, they had a whole range of ARM based PDAs.
RISCOS was licenced to Pace. I don't know the whole story, but I think Pace managed to hire some of the Acorn staff.
RISCOS is ultra-fast, tiny (several megabytes), runs from ROM for bootup speeds which put BeOS to shame, easy to program for, easy to use so long as you can understand its weird 3-mouse buttoned gui, and still has a userbase of maybe several hundred thousand.
Linux can be run on Acorn systems too.
There are usergroups, Acorn computer fairs, and companies dedicated to the Acorn platform in the UK. It isn't going to go away any time soon. This is why they've put together this Lyonix computer, and a couple of other companies are putting their own Acorn clones too.
If you're wondering why it is the price it is, well they're coving themselves because low-production-run motherboards are highly expensive to produce. My guess would be there'll be substancial price-drops for new RISCOS/ARM systems within a year when they can be more certain of production numbers, and competition arrives on the scene.
There is alot of freeware and educational software available for RISCOS. A commercial game called "Tek" was released for Riscos recently.
Btw, is there anyone in the US using RISCO? If you are, I bet you weird out all your friends
I've got an Acorn Achimedes with an ARM 3 (8mhz)and 4MB ram in it along with 500 MBharddrive. If this were a PC is might just run linux.
It runs a FULL GUI with anti aliased fonts. Multitasking and a better DTP program than i have on my 2 ghz PC. I easily drag stuff from my scientific notation package to a WP.
If only modern stuff ran this well.
Iwillbe looking seriously at these things
Hmmm almost $2k for this box. I'd suspect you could never make up cost/power saving ratio but hey I do like to have different architectures available.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
this is all so stupid. just admit intel/ms ownz j00 and buy a dell.
A troll stands alone
Thinking he was very smart
But he's an A.C.
What kind of fucking
wimpy ass lamer trolls while
anonymous, eh?
Don't give me none of this "nature theme" business.
The point of building an XScale-based desktop PC and then sticking it into such a big, ugly package really eludes me. It's not like you can add a lot of expansion boards to it anyway.
XSCALE RISC-OS PCs run on YOU !
(Sorry, but reading all these RISC-OS fanboy comments is getting me down, so I'm providing some light relief...)
-MT.
Not like Torvalds, the leader of the Plastic Finlander O-No Microsoft Band.
... NetBSD. (or it should any minute now)
Score:1 Interesting?
Whatever drug it is that the moderators are on, I want it...
From what I seen, RiscOS is mainly used in England and other European countries. Can anyone share what they like about it?
you linux fud guys are ten times worse than microsoft
fuck you, hypocrite
go choke on your mom's cock
http://www.owonder.com/bitbopper/classic
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
--hey, check out the other slashdot story today about the "littlepc". It's 12 volt dc! Just the ticket for your solar cabin. You could probably even modify any old case, the littlepc fits in one of the larger drive bays. You could cut it open and make it so the lcd screen and keyboard fit inside for traveling. Granted, not a laptop, but still,a possible nifty project. We run on solar and watch our watts as well, the deal with laptops is the stupid adapters waste watts converting the juice, tons of waste heat off those things. Hmm, for that matter you might be able to adapt a small UPS battery inside your project case as well, so you'd have a built in "emergency power".
If I was going to do it, I'd use an old busted mac 6400 tower case, for the killer built into the case sound system. I had one, just amazingly good sound from the internal speakers.
Of course if you really want to run this other OS, oh well...carry on
http://saveie6.com/
YOu don't know what you're talking about, which is obvious when you wrote "software emulated". Ha-ha, is your Palm in need of fresh batteries, or is AOL overbilling you AGAIN?
XScale is a slouch due to current design failures. Intel will fix it... eventually.
Because they can't figure out a way to make 'em leak oil... ;p
My firt question would be : "Who's making applications for this thing?" I wouldn't want to adopt the best OS and best Hardware only to find that I can't get a good selection of quality software at a reasonable price. I mean, there is a reason I have a PC and not a MAC.
I guess that's flamebait for both sides isn't it?
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
RTFM dimwit. XScale is a version of ARM made by Intel and probably named so stupudly because Intel are embarrassed to have to rely on some body else's design to be able to make a low energy cpu. As is usual for Intel they've managed to make it a more complex part than really needed with a longer pipeline than other ARMs. They seem to have a hangup about 'my pipeline is longer than yours'.
Everybody and their dog makes assorted kinds of ARM. ARMs are everywhere; PDAs, cameras, printers, mp3 players, DVD players, radios, fax machines, routers, all that sort of thing. Even Motorola eventually caved in and licensed the ARM architecture. One day the secret feature will be enabled and control of the world will revert to the British Empire! You will all have to learn cricket and proper accents! So there!
--check it oput sometime, you can get 12 vdc and 24 vdc appliances. A lot of times as close as your nearest marina boat store or RV place. We keep trying to gradually change over to all dc appliances, or if they were already dc to get better ones. Example, we had 12 volt incadescents, we switched to fluorescents. Next step is LED strip lighting. The vacuum cleaner, switched from a 110 AC to a smallish but still "good enough" 12 volt vac I found, a small step up from a normal car vac. Our tvs are 12 volt, but the color/vcr combo one crapped out on the dc part so had to switch that one back to AC, (well, that's for the girlfriend here, she's the movie nut), I have a small 12 vdc black and white I use whenever I really want to follow a breaking news story as I sit at the computer. I've got laptops and desktops, but this project I just thunked up is intriguing me now, laptops just got too small of a screen, and 99.99% of the time they sit around for me as a desktop, so I just use the energy hog desktop so I can have a bigger monitor. I know I could run the monitor from the laptop, but the desktop is a bigger better computer.
If this littlepc was cheaper-down to 500$ maybe- I'd consider it, but a grand right now..well..guess I'd still go a hundred bucks more and get an iBook. I mean, you still need to get the LCD monitor, and they *ain't* cheap.
As to the solar itself, going on 4 years now for us, my only regret is not doing it a decade earlier. I'd encourzge anyone to at least start on it, decent battery bank storage, a panel or two and a charge controller and possibly an inverter. I'd size the components in advance so you could add extra PV panels as you want to and can afford it. I'd start with the solar rig running the computer in the home as it makes a *nifty* UPS system, beats the pants off buying a dedicated UPS. all ya got to do is check the battery size difference, heh, my "backup" batteries would run this desktop for days and days without any solar input from a decent full charge. Also note this last ice storm, millions still without ANY power. Having guaranteed SOME all the time is a lot better than ZERO when you really WANT some power.
... is the best in the world. It's wonderful, superb, fantastic, beautiful. By far the best assembler I've ever used (I've used 68k, PPC, x86, PIC, ZX80 and 6502, and perhaps some more). And RiscOS is/was a fantastic OS (font anti-aliasing from the late '80s, etc.), with the best editor ever, which is currently nearly completely ported to 32-bit status.
James F.
How much noise does an XScale CPU setup generate vs and Athlon? I'd be willing to bet that the Xscale runs much cooler, requiring less noisy heat-dissipation mechanisms, and making the PC suitable for places like the bedroom, livingroom, or say, the office...
I don't know, but to me the noise factor is a really big advantage.
Moderators you are mis-leading everyone as much as the attempt of that troll. Check the link before moderating the post please. For the love of peace, don't moderate what you haven't checked.
SLASHDOT IS GREAT!
Who modded this post down?
This page is hosted by Intel (computer hardware).
You moderators realy need to check the webpage before moderating the post down. Just my two pico-cents.
-Intel employee
But seriously... The hardware looks fast and nice, but still, is there actually anybody in the real world that uses it??? I really wouldn't want one for free even, just a waste of time
I'm a fan of RISC OS, so I'm definately biased, RISC OS has many problems, if I could get some form of decent file-shareing going with my other machines and had a better monitor to put on my current machine It'd probably see a lot more use.
:)
Will I rush out and buy one of these machines, probably not, but in a few years time when I'm earning a reasonable wage, I will probably head out and grab one, or a similar thing to it, possibly also a sexy LiLan case for it too
The parent post shouts `I'm trolling for those in the know, but don't quite get it.'
1) use boot floppies (e.g. debian, & probably Slackware) and suck the required material into the system via network to an exterial or local machine. 2) conect the hard drive(From the ARM PC) into another PC. Use boot floppies, or a CD and be done.
Interesting advice.
Of course, it's not a goatse link, which is most easily verified by the fact that there are no visible problems with the URL. It points to intel, and that's where it goes.
YOu are an idiot. Have a nice day.
Call me when Intel puts floating point in an ARM. Except that it's unlikely that they ever will: they're afraid it will compete with their x86 sales. In the meantime, XSCALE is way underpowered for FP-intensive applications...
The Dragonball used in almost all Palms up till now is in fact an M68k processor which is definitely a CISC chip! Yup, that's the same kind of processor used in the first macs and amigas...
...)
And emulation of RISC chips is not difficult at all: ever tried building a cross-compilation GNU toolchain? GDB has simulators included for a _lot_ of architectures. (ARM, MIPS, SuperH,
Any ports to PDAs of RISC OS?
(20second wait sucks, idiot slash, 5 second sis better)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
MMMmmmmmmmmmm VIRUS
I want a full openGL modern multiplayer 50 user port of this on a 10000000x100000000 mapped level.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
why can't they make that into a smaller desktop?
Though I'm not altogether enthralled with the thought of running a PDA-level CPU as a "full" computer, that's not really a setback if it's not being used as a serious workhorse (however much the company may claim that they have spectacular performance).
For me, the catch is that they've basically put this 'revolutionary' design into an ordinary, beige mini-tower case (clearly to save costs). If you don't need gobs of power and don't need to worry about that much heat generation, why use up all the extra space? In my mind, it would have probably helped sales more to use one of those slimline desktop case designs, or even a 2U rackmount (assuming the GF2 MX will fit, it might need something closer to a 3U).
Basically, this computer is too big and plain to be practical in terms of the CPU it has. Also, it's not very stylish; when you're trying to advertise your PC as being unique, don't give the impression that it's no different than anything else!
At that price, you could get a brand-new 650MHz SPARC workstation from a company called Sun Microsystems running an operating system called Solaris which is very Unix like. This CPU has 512kb on-chip 2nd-level cache and decent floating-point (unlike XSCale).
The machine has serial, USB and Firewire ports, and 10/100 ethernet, not to mention ATA-100 disks, PCI,CD-ROM and a smart card reader, and it can be upgraded to 4GB RAM!!
Solaris still has a large and dedicated user-base, and Sun still supports it (see docs.sun.com).
Whilst the OS is loaded from hard disk, cdrom or network, you can get into a monitor very quick (about 10 seconds from power-on) by pressing "Stop-A" and here you have a full Forth interpreter if you wish to start programming very quick. This monitor is called "OpenBoot" and is stored in Flash ROM.
Once you have your machine, you can download thousands of free applications! The GNU stuff, for instance, almost always works on it.
These machines, and some even larger models are still in use, worldwide!
This was certainly true up to a point. If you have between 30k-300k transistors (I forgot the original ARM count), it is certainly the best.
For modern chips (30M-300M and above), its not so good. There doesn't seem to be a clean way to expand it to 64bits, it could use a few more registers, there is no standard floating point part of the ISA.
It should be noted that nobody has made an ARM that is superscaler or out-of-order. Without those features, a CPU can not compete in absolute performance (if it has them, it can't really compete in mips/watts with ARM).
Note that it is certainly better than most of the chips you named, but 68k was the only one with similar restrictions:PIC, Z-80 and 6502 could be implemented in less silicon than the ARM register set takes, x86 and PPC/Power can easily beat xscale in raw performance. As far as I know, there is an ARM that is faster/smaller/less-power-hungry for each process size then any 68k shipped.
What was I ranting about again?
I've been thinking of building an ARM based linux-running system, nothing big, something real cheap and with a small passive LCD. The whole system cost should not exceed $100. Better Still if it could take power through the LAN connector, or connect via lan-on-power lines.
This machine seems to come close, but is loaded with unnecessities like the geforce, cdrw and so many others. ARM is suited for making the lowest-cost systems for education and wiring up third-world countries. I'm talking about something resembling slackware 3.0, or something with busybox, flash, ulibc and lynx based-browsers running on low-cost LCDs, unless CRTS turn out to be lower-cost.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
An Acorn 3010 computer (early 1990s).
A newish version of RiscOS
Realize, you could use this as an awsome web server! Adding a second NIC would make a fast cheap router. This is basicly the config for all those expensive cisco routers out there! The real purpose is all the legacy apps that use older now-exotic hardware. Arm has been around for many years also here in the states, and is used in many machine controllers. Most of the companies that created the stuff have gone out of business, but the machines are perfectly functional--except they use 8" floppies (with the jap spec) and RS-232 (not c) & RS-488 for conections. But like the vererable C64, they are workhorses that have been ticking for 20+ years with lots of luv. There are 50 yr old guys out there that do this every day and don't want to gut an entire $250,000 machine just to use a $399 PC and throw out all the work they have done. Also, this is cool because it works--this is mostly the same specs as an Ipac or Zarus. Linux can be installed, so along with the PPC board from the other day this is a good thing indeed. Just like using Linux--It's all about choices!!! Linux allows people to have more cool choices again and here is proof!!
go to www.epistaxsis.ukgateway.net for a picture of a RISC OS desktop.
WARNING! this is a 2048x1536 24bit JPEG so if you're bandwidth restricted it'll take a while.
Doesn't it look nice?
This is one of the reasons I use RISC OS - can you imagine windows/linux/BeOS/MacOS being as clear in such a resolution (I have tried all except MacOS in 1600x1200 and they were unreadable!)?
Note also the lack of text based File/Edit/View stuff in the windows (or top of screen for mac users...) - this is all done on the middle mouse button. This is one of the best features of the WIMP as it lets you perform an action on an object without shifting the mouse - which is brill for graphics.
BTW you get a text editor, a bitmap prog & a vector prog built into the ROM - how cool is that?
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