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AdvantageSix Promises a Tiny ARM-based Computer
oberondarksoul writes "Drobe, one of the leading RISC OS news websites, is reporting that AdvantageSix have displayed an in-development version of their forthcoming A9home system. Running on a 400MHz Samsung ARM9 processor, and measuring approximately 6.6x4x2 inches, this ought to be a cheap -- and reasonably powerful -- RISC OS-based alternative to small form factor PCs or the Mac mini."
Can the rest of the world have those measurements in units we can understand?
Now how much is that in CM?
My hacked site
They're old/crap even by ARM standards!
The processor seems to be rather large. This kind of measurements have lately been seen in adult industry, not in home electronics.
This new market sector of small, stripped-down PCs (a la Mac Mini) I foresee becoming extremely popular. The costs are low, therefore people who have given that excuse to not owning a computer will be happy to buy. Usage is simple, which will appeal to the same group of people. They will be useful for clusters (ie. Beowolf) as they are not made more costly by monitors, mice, et cetera. It is easy to take one and install an alternate OS on it (again, a la Mac mini). As well, they will be a hit with developing countries. Cheapness without the ambiguity of a white-box.
Looking at the specs sheet and the expected price It really is not any competition for the Mac mini, so its expected to retail for around 499GBP+vat(17.5% on top of that) in the UK (if UKP means UK pound ?, ) which is already alot more than the price of the 1.42ghz g4 based mac mini , which comes with double the ram , double the harddrive .It will probably make a great ARM development machine but i don't think its trying to compete with SFF PCs and MacMinis.
-Comparing it to a macmini is really doing it a great dis-service
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
ARM9 and an ARM7?
Is it a bit like those digital watches that are calculators and phone books then?
I don't see an ethernet port on this thing.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
499 UK pounds is almost $912. And you don't get extras like a keyboard.
For that kind of dough, you can get a pretty fancy Intel computer.
OK, the architecture is "elegant." And the form factor is really tiny. How else is this useful?
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
Makes my 75MHz Intel Pentium router look like a Apollo 11 computer.
168x103x53mm in a blue metal box
400MHz Samsung ARM9 processor
Embedded graphics processor
128M SDRAM
8M VRAM
10/100MBit network
40GB hard disc
4 x USB sockets
Microphone in
2 x PS/2
RS232 serial
5V power supply, 20W power
Why would anyone buy something that's £250 (almost $500) more expensive than a Mac Mini, and is lacking the style and the compatibility?
How is such a stripped down box that costs 900 USD competition for a 500 USD Mac Mini again? If you insist on Linux, download some Yellow Dog and you're done.
Thanks :)
So there is a world outside USA border.
My hacked site
The mass produced machine will probably be smaller, if it ever does reach mass production stage. It'll have to be *really* cheap to make it into any significant number of homes.
Deleted
Yes when you spend $3000 to buy extras.
My hacked site
There are loads of pictures and videos of the A9home - including comparisons to a 50 pence coin and a Mac Mini - on The Iconbar's show report:
http://www.iconbar.com/news/wakefield2005/report/
We shall find out after Longhorns release , ETA: sometime around the release of DN:forever
...NetBSD?
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
6.6x4x2 inches = 0.033x0.020x0.010 rods
It's what you do with it.
RISC OS is just a little bit more efficient than Windows, MAC or even Linux. Where 256Mb is a struggle for Windows + GUI apps and 128Mb a struggle for a MAC or Linux + GUI apps, ITYF that we're talking 16Mb being the lower limit for RISC OS + GUI apps.
You're really comparing melons and apples to cherries.
Deleted
I'm a bit confused about what problem this product is trying to solve. It's not really smaller, cheaper, or faster than a Mac mini or other currently available "mini pc". It definitely gets points in the "neato" factor, but I can't picture many people buying one unless one or more of the points above changes. Cheers,
Come on he is asking a valid question why did you mod him Redundant.
I was trying to work out why these people continue to use this platform, and it can only be a manifestation of that sadistic quality that is present in so many geeks - the one that leads us to defile a beautiful Mac mini with the installation of, say, Slackware 7 or Red Hat 5.2, just to be difficult, or why we tunnel PPP over SSH to create VPNs (because IPSec and PPTP are for lusers). I looked at a few screenshots, read some articles - one which particularly amused me was that which opined the lack of full and decent internationalisation (it seemed so prehistoric) - but it was somewhat reassuring.
There is still a group of individuals who run scared from the Macintosh, and who belittle those that use it, although their numbers are declining, and rightly so, because the Mac's superiority in all fields bar gaming is so resplendent ("Que le flamewar commence!"), but I like to think that having seen this, Mac users' choice seems a little more rational - at least their OS-du-jour is better than the standard (i.e. Windows). RISC OS just sucks.
So I really can't bring myself to coo over the specs of this machine. It's about as big as the Mac mini, yet:
- it lacks an optical drive;
- the processor is about as powerful as modern-day PDAs;
- it's fucking expensive for what it is;
- less RAM, VRAM, disk space, etc. but on the plus side you do get an RS232 serial port...
Call me a philistine or a cynic, perhaps, but what's the point? There are plenty of us who've got a Windows 95-era machine somewhere, and for those of us that don't but still want the same "feel", there's always KDE. So why am I going to fork out five hundred quid for this...?iqu
...if it actually had a 3" miniCD drive, for really small Linux distros like DSL, RealFeather, or ZipSlax?
Then we can tell the MacMini fanatics, yes, it HAS an optical drive, as you pop in a miniCD with the opening credits (only) of say, the Matrix...
This story reads like someone's paranoid MRD.
I'm sure it'll steamroll the Windows XP juggernaut any day now. People don't listen to their computers anyway, so sound is of little consequence.
Crashing? Feh. That's just the "core dump wizard"
ALREADY!
This is a very UN-insightful post. It's NOT inexpensive (FAR from it), not good as a cheap/entry level home PC, not good for developping countries or such. The OS it'll run won't appeal to most people (not Windows nor OS X, perhaps linux will run on it, but most non-geek home users don't want to run linux). The system specs are pretty low and price high. I can't see these become popular by any measure.
What's the problem with a white-box anyhow? If you want a GOOD and inexpensive PC, that's still the best solution.
There are many many companies making small single board computers. Here's one example from the Circuit Cellar ads. (Yes, it runs X-Linux.) You have to slap it in a case with drive and power supply, but that's not a major Grail Quest. If it doesn't suit your computing power requirements, shop around somewhere else. (If you don't need horsepower, you can also make tradeoff and go smaller.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The price is unfortunately inevitable in such a small market, considering the development costs vs. expected sales it probably isn't too unreasonable. Or unexpected, anyway.
I thought it did come with a mouse and keyboard.
The RAM and disc space a more than adequate for RISC OS machines, which are pretty frugal with both.
I'm sure a far faster machine would be made if suitable processors were available, but since RISC OS is tied to ARM (look up ARM's history), then alas that's going to be what it's stuck with. The use of that particular ARM, instead of some of the faster alternative ones, might be with an eye to what might be available in the future. It doesn't mean it'll be chronically slow, only chronically slow if you want to do excessive number crunching.
There is a depressing amount of dubious spec comparison, a lot of which makes as much sense as saying a lorry is better than a sports car because it can carry a lot more.
The only reason to buy this is if you absolutely must run RiscOS. That is its only real feature.
In every other detail it loses vs a SFF PC or Mac Mini. It's not smaller or faster. It's also much more expensive.
I'm not even sure this is a particularly great ARM platform either. I've seen other small ARM systems which were similarly equipped and much cheaper to boot.
I'm not sure RiscOS really reached any significant popularity outside the UK. It appears to me this is more of a nostalgia effort much like the amiga revival projects.
Could the A9home be a good module in a wearable computer configuration, possible in conjunction with a head-mounted display and one hand keyboard? Are there better options?
As far as most people are concerned at this point anything close to 720X576 is high definiton and I can play that from Divx on my 400Mhz K62 PC not problem using Movix. So, does that mean that the K62 is the cut off point for good enough? I suppose so. Doesn't say much for PC sales, does it?
1080i is great in theory, but the catch is --where you going to display 1080i in a wide screen format right here and now for a few hundred bucks? Not happening and won't be happening for years. Years. Business can't wait years.
Anyway, your prediction suggests you don't know what existing hardware can do with decent software as opposed to that commercial crap.
Is already RISC. Thank you.
BTW, the ARM processor is what powers HP's 49g+ calculator. It kicks the snot out of anything TI manufactures, including in the not-so-coveted battery consumption.
I know I don't speak for everybody here at Slashdot, but my arms are considerably larger than transistors. I would imagine an arm-based computer would be as big as a small city. Also, since arms use muscles, the computer will probably get tired after a certain amount of time and start running slow. It is an interesting idea, but I don't see AdvantageSix selling very many of these.
Anyone else find it odd that they were going for size and yet they still included PS/2 ports? Besides being physically smaller they are two less ports that are needed these days and can be removed for sinerios like this.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
You dumbass troll
I really do not know why supporters of the BBC Micro and its descendants still bother, given that each successive generation eventually gets buried at a crossroads, but please someone get the flaming torches and the villagers with pitchforks, and put a stake through the thing's heart. It's sad and pathetic to see it flapping around trying to get off the ground, and even if it does its chance that anything will stay around long enough to be bitten in the neck is nonexistent. It was a good design for the 70s, folks, it was OK for the 80s, but this is the 21st century and we use those things for PDAs. If you want to build a competitor for the Mac Mini, there's the AMD 64 mobile technology just asking for a Novell/Suse 9.3 build. Please?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
1) It's very pricy. ARM cpus are dirt cheap compared to power or x86 CPUs, the rest of the components are pretty standard. The build cost for this machine should be less that 100USD in reasonable sized runs.
2) It draws A LOT of power. I don't think that any ARM machine I've worked with draws close to 20W @ 5V.
On the whole though, I think this is a cool idea - when I worked on a 200Mhz Xscale ARM running Debian, it was perfectly fine for web surfing, etc. Perfect for Mom and Pop if they just wanted to surf & do email.
Damnit - I wanted my nick to be "WouldIPutMYRealNameOnSlashdot"
-1 Troll
The keyboard is the ergonomic monstrosity from MS called the Natural keyboard and the mouse is a steering wheel with two footpedals.
There is much more of a market for a $125.00 computer than is for a $400 to $500 one.
Why can't you just take one of the $50 linux based routers and add extra memory to get a $50 embedded system with decent specs?
It's got the same CPU as the HP-49G+ calculator, which sells for about £125 in the UK.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Heck with the Mac, this thing makes the folks trying to resurrect BeOS with a shonky binary and some new user interface look mainstream. Heck, there's even a more rational reason to try and resurrect Amiga now that it's going to be a realtime microkernel again.
Yes, there is. But there are also those if us who try to use the better measurement system within its borders as well. And yes, I've always lived in the US.
The article says it will retail for 499.00 UKP (911.112 USD). That's not cheap in my book. You can get an "expensive" Apple computer for less than that. Although if you're looking for a RISC OS based device, it's probably a good deal. (The lack of 26-bit emulation kind of hurts though).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Wasn't that an old fad back in the 90s when people thought that using a reduced instruction set would result in better performance? Didn't Apple prove that this isn't true by the dismal failure of their PowerPC based Macs? I remember my girlfriend at the time buying one of them through my discount from Uni. She paid $5000 for the system (at a discount). It was 1994. She got a PowerMac 6600. It had 16 megs of RAM, and one of the 601 chips. We had a devil of a time finding software for it. I bought a beige box PC with a 486 at 66 Megahurts and 32 Megs of RAM. But I also got a 15" minotaur instead of her full 12 inches. I expected my 486 to be blown away by the PPC chip since they both ran at about the same clock speed. (BTW my system cost $4000 and I got a lot more stuff. Macs sucked ass even back then) But instead her Mac was SLOWER than my CISC 486!! Imagie that!!! Isn't it funny how RISC is apropos since anyone who bases their compay on a non-Intel chip is taking a HUGE RISK!!! LOL!!!
Sharp Zaurus SL-C* models have 400 MHz ARM CPUs... *and* they're cheaper, it seems. Not to mention more convenient. Unless these have better HDs, I'd rather import a Z than get one.
Luke-Jr
If you really want to make some constructive comments, try RISC OS first - you might just like it.
I can't believe that (several!) people wasted good mod points on this inanity, so here is an "Unfair" on your "Informative", you silly moderator.
...on your post which I can't do anything about, but I do my bit in the fight against stupidity with a little meta moderation.