“The two opposing corners of RISC OS have apparently agreed to join forces and jointly coordinate development of the OS. RISCOS Ltd, who produce RISC OS 4 and 6, and RISC OS Open, who are overseeing RISC OS 5 development, promised this week to, effectively, chat to each other over a coffee.”
Best news since the source release
Edited 2007-11-27 23:23
wooot!!! I guess someone must have hit them both over the head with a clue stick. Now all we need is the same guy to do the same with Amiga/Hyperion Beos/Haiku/Zeta and we are ready to take on Microsoft….
… err ok, mibbie not
Can anyone tell me who owns the RISC instruction set these days? I’m guessing it was sold off to intel?
EDIT: nevermind..
“However RISCOS Ltd and RISC OS Open pledged today to work together to make sure future developments are jointly coordinated: new features added to one stream should be expected to be compatible with features present in another stream”
Until they merge they’ll just keep becoming less irrelevant
Edited 2007-11-28 02:48
ack! relevant.
RISC OS uses ARM, so the ISA is owned by ARM Ltd. Intel bought a license to produce ARM-compatible processors (well, actually they took over the license from Digital, when they bought parts of it), but they don’t “own” the ISA.
Has what was Acorn always used ARM? I remember at school we used to have a tech studies room full of Acorn RISC Archimedes computers… I remember posters on the walls advertising the RISC chip as 24bit… I vaguely remember reading that intel were CISC whereas AMD was a mix of RISC/CISC architectures
So those posters would have been about ARM chips?
cheers.
Ian.
AMD use CISC now I think. I remember them using RISC internaly with a CISC interpreter in the past.
1) RISC isn’t an instruction set but a concept; the ISA itself are things like SPARC, POWER, MIPS and so forth, which implement in their respective ISA’s in a RISC manner.
2) AMD bought out an MIPS processor company which created embedded processor designs, IIRC the name was called Alchemy. The last time I had a check it was pretty good.
3) Intel used to sell an ARM varient called Xscale, but have since sold it off to Marvell.
4) Intel have decided that x86 is the future, they’ve already demonstrated a super-duper low powered chip based on the ISA which delivers lower power than traditional RISC based processors.
5) Both Intel and AMD have RISC cores internally, but then again, there is a major difference now between what the ISA is and what the microarchitecture is.
In the Past Acorn Archimedes was based on RISC processor manufactured by ARM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
The actual Acorn Archimedes derivative “clone” (Iyonix) is based on Intel XScale 80321 RISC processor.
http://www.iyonix.com/
ahhh ok gotcha
Is there any real significant reason to be using this architecture today in a desktop/server computer?
I ask this as a real question rather than flamebait. I keep wishing something better than CISC and cheaper than SPARC/POWER6 comes out that I can get my hands on and so far with the Amiga/PPC I’ve been a bit let down with the specs:^Alb ratio
“Is there any real significant reason to be using this architecture today in a desktop/server computer? ”
Cost of operation. The ARM series of CPU’s use less power than similarly specced CPU’s from other families. And the performance, while not besting quad-core Xeons, can deliver a suitably fast desktop environment.
” I keep wishing something better than CISC and cheaper than SPARC”
Incidentally, one can get SPARC CPU’s for not too much. Only speaking of the 32-bit ones, but they’re common in embedded solutions.
“but they’re common in embedded solutions” Hehe thanks
I’ll remember that for the next industrial machine I integrate.
A screw it, why do that when I can just build my own Niagara II under GPL!
Or I could just save the billions of dollars of investment in fabs and manhours and just go buy a quad core Xeon?
I’m surprised ARM isn’t 64bit by now…
Whatever happened to the dual CORE lowpower G5s that IBM announced just after Apple agreed to jump to Intel? can you get them with motherboard etc?
Hmmmm I wonder what the world would be like if Big Blue hadn’t decided to build the cpu’s for every console manufacturer.
Good luck doing that
Youw regular Xilinx FPGA just won’t cut it =P
Or a quad core Core 2. Will save you quite a lot of money on motherboard and RAM alone.
There is (at least for the interesting cases): look for the NEON instructions. Any other use for 64-bit (namely, address space) is currently so out of scope for ARM applications that it’s just a waste of die area and bandwidth.
Vapourware (or liquidware? What would the proper term be regarding vapour… hardware?). IBM was making enough money with the Xenon (Xbox 360) already, and with high volume orders of Cell and Broadway just around the corner…
Additionaly, the “low power” version was going to be in-order, IIRC 2-issue, and given that they would absolutely require IBM’s own compiler to extract any kind of performence, it’s not a surprise that this idea didn’t really took off.
BTW, just in case you were referring to PA Semi’s PWRficient, they’re STILL not available in any significant volume.
It’s not like they “decided”, but they sold the idea everywhere and the console manufacturers bought it. And it all started with the Gamecube. Worked for them, but not for a manufacturer of 1″ thin notebooks with some serious performance stigmas to overcome…
I loved the idea of the G5 architecture. I’m not saying IBM did anything bad jumping in with the consoles but at the time the G5s were running WAY too hot for any kind of laptop.
It would appear my dual core g5 sources were indeed vapourware although I don’t believe in smoke without fire so I can only assume there is some truth in it. Even if its just because Apple couldnt wait (for quite legitimate reasons) to jump architectures and IBM needed the fab space for the consoles… I think Apple made the right decision for the time even if it had to be Intel.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2005/07/08/ibm-introduc…
IBM statement
http://tinyurl.com/bfbkj
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/26/ibm_ppc970mp/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/16/ibm_powerpc_antares_sp/
Understanding the questionable credibility of both sites (sometimes they hit sometimes they miss) I’d like to ask what you think of this…. the ibm statement adds fuel to my theory — although upon checking the link it would appear IBM has pulled the press release le sigh!
I found a reference to the press release here…. but I’m beginning to feel like I’m chasing mirrors…
http://tinyurl.com/yqjr8k
“A screw it, why do that when I can just build my own Niagara II under GPL!
Good luck doing that
Youw regular Xilinx FPGA just won’t cut it =P ”
But a custom ASIC would, and the cost of getting one of those has dropped to a few thousand now. While still more expensive than an off-the-shelf, compared to even 5 years ago, the cost has dropped through the floor.
It was 26bit if I remember correctly. Well, they were internally 32bit but had a 26bit address bus.
ack! yes it was… you just reminded me
RISC was the second coming while I was at school.. nowadays the only place I see it is the ARM in my XDA and the XSCALE in my XDAII… I realise they must still make a shedload of money from embedded devices but it would be nice if they still had a decent cpu for the ‘desktop’.
yeah, pretty much every portable device that doesnt have an x86 cpu shoved into them uses an ARM cpu of some form. I always had REALLY good performance out of them compared to other chips. I guess it was partly because of the OSes running on top of them as well. My Psion 5 had a 18mhz arm6, I believe, with 8mb of ram and I could run a crapload of programs on it at once with no real slowdown
I miss that…
Acorn designed the ARM processor (the acronym used to be for “Acorn RISC Machine”) and used it in the Archimedes and RISC PC series of desktop computers and the A4 laptop. At the time the Archimedes was launched, it was by far the most powerful home computer on the market — it even outperformed many professional workstations. The ARM IP was spun off in a separate company (ARM Ltd.) after Apple showed interest in using it (which they did in the Newton PDA). Since the Newton required a low-power processor, development of ARM was taken in this direction rather than towards desktop use. This has been successful in the sense that nearly all PDAs and most mobile phones use ARM, but it also means that ARM can not compete against desktop processors from Intel and AMD in terms of compute power.
Since the speed increase in these has slowed down in recent years, ARM is closing in on them, though. Current dedicated RISC OS machines use rather old versions of the ARM processor, though, mainly for development cost reasons (the market is too small to support high development costs).
Thanks for the info
“Since the speed increase in these has slowed down in recent years, ARM is closing in on them, though”
Question though, 600mhz is catching up? I notice they quote ‘over 1ghz’ on their website. I’m sure the architecture would be nice to compare against CISC cycle per cycle… but I’m guessing the lowpower parallel configuration of these is where they really shine. Too bad I dont have the workroom to print off my own motherboard
A bit like the MIPS chips in the ye olde Sgi machines?
You know, I also just realised – the Nintendo DS is powered by both an ARM7 and an ARM9 chip… I’m kinda surprised no one has launched a RISCOS PDA considering most arms run linux or WinCE
OS9, RISCOS, BeOS, AmigaOS4 — I think would all run pretty well on a handheld device.
Edited 2007-11-28 16:35
It would be quite natural, yes, as RISC OS works fine with limited resources and limited screen resolution (I used it with 640×256 for a long time). I think the reasons are mainly economic: It takes some effort to port RISC OS to a PDA platform, and if you have a small development team, the hardware is likely to be outdated by the time you are done.
There was a plan to port RISC OS to Psion’s Netbook, but this plan died, partly because Psion stopped making the Netbooks, I guess.
This is why you don’t split a kernel!
Good news for all.