and in about 75% of the world's mobile phones. Or something like that.
MIPS architecture.
In consumer electronics, where power consumption matters, RISC is where it's at.
The Iyonix pc is produced by Castle Technology Ltd and sold direct and by a number of retailers in a number of boxes - including kit form. The RiscStation R7500 is still available from CTA though it's a touch long in the tooth. The A9home (from Advantage6) has been available to experienced users as a beta machine for about 6 months and is soon to be released (guesses are at next month's Wakefield Show on 13th May) and on sale from CJE Micro's. Advantage6 are also demonstrating 'work in hand' at our local (South Manchester) RISC OS group tomorrow night (and you're welcome ;-)
R7500 - 5 years old Iyonix - 3 years old A9home - new (Also Virtual RiscPC software available for Windows machines.)
Previous RISC OS machines from the last 10 years capable of being upgraded to run the latest RISC Operating System include RiscPC (600, 700, StrongARM, &c), A7000, A7000+, Omega.
Minority interest - but *not* dead! ;-)
Yes I have used that and it's fine for standard Word processing. But in my experience it's not so good with more complex DTP type formatting using Text boxes, and non aligned graphics and drawings and it doesn't appear to interpret these things in a way consistent with MS Word.
Obviously if you are going to use Word in that way where something has to be totally WYSIWYG totally accurate and consistent, there is only room for one consistent version of Word and all these fake versions are totally superfluous and create more problems than they solve.
That said though if you going to send a document to a printer you are better off outputting it in some form of bitmap format, or using Adobe Acrobat format. You can actually get something called Acrobat Distiller, which if you set up a generic postscript driver i.e install a PostScript printer and have it print to file, you can then use Acrobat Distiller to convert your PostScript file to an acrobat PDF file, (though Usually you have to change the extension of your *.prt file to *.ps at lest one did in the version of Acrobat distiller i had). This of course means one can print Adobe Acrobat PDF files from any program and since they use postscript language and vector curves to interpret fonts or use standard PostScript fonts that all postscript printers have this generally is the most reliable format to use for outputting work. In which case one could quite safely use OPenOffice.
I'm sure John will give you the complete list.
But here's a site to have a look at a couple.
Sure. But they're not *dead* in the desktop market and there is much more than the desktop market. The discussion started with talk of the legacy of Acorn's RISC OS system - specifically ArtWorks/Xara - and that legacy still underpins much that is good in current hardware and software development today.
Playstation 2, STBs, routers...
But you knew that.
Ah, I assumed he was talking about desktop boxes.
Better than my old SGI Challenge-S, anyway.
None in mission critical applications thank the lord...
And I have to say that most of those I have had direct experience of are unreliable as hell.
Yes I thought that might be amounst the specialised uses. I have a Motorola A1000 myself and I doubt that uses an Intel processor :)
Also made to be able to survive a nuclear strike and launch a retaliatory attack long after the rest of us are dead.
Well it would probably more correct to day it's not used so much in desktop PCs. I wasn't disputing the fact that they have specialised uses :)
OS2? Gosh. I remember that.It almost worked...better than Windoesn't anyway.
CP/M. I wrote a till under CP/M. It only crashed once..when the bloke sold a demo version that I neglected to tell him I had time bombed so he wouldn't.:-)
Word is not a DTP program. Its approximations to such are primitive. Get something that does it properly and was designed to do desktop DTP (eg Ovation).
[Snip]
Although the ARM processors were designed for desktop machines they work superbly well in embedded applications because they take so little power and don't get hot. My A9 desktop computer has a 5V input - it needs that much because its 4 USB ports need to have a minimal output available. The only (waste) heat is from the external transformer and presumably you could find an alternative power source in place of that. The machine itself runs at room temperature with no noise (no fan). All this is indicative of embedded applications - but there is no need to have a large, noisy, power-greedy, hot machine just because it's sat on your desk rather than in your pocket.
The A1000 uses ARM7 & ARM9 cores, one for baseband, one for application.
I'm sure he was, but in the interests of pedantry...
TMBSNMOTP "specialised uses" OWIWPU.
You sound just like a Mac user.
Hmm, well the RISC/CISC wars seem to have settled down with even the company that shipped the most RISC systems settling for CISC. After all in hte great run of things the processor is largely and irrelevance as Apple have proved by moving the same OS from CISC to RISC and back to CISC and even swapping the "endianess" of the systems along the way.
I know how dearly RISCOS advocates love their computers and the OS god help them, but objectively it's not much of an OS and it doesn't have much of a userbase either. Pointing at systems currently for sale reminds me rather of the last gasp of the QL.
It still works...is still being sold and developed:
"John Cartmell" wrote
That's what people say about Linux boxes. That is wrong.
If you factor in the cost of wasted time setting up the system and keeping it going, then the TCO is suddenly a whole lot cheaper for a MS box, where admin & setup is simple, quick & easy!
That's interesting to know. Thanks :) There I was taking the RISC of discounting these ARMs in consumer elecronics and my phone has two ARMs :)
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