Anybody know what this is?

[cahult]

Came across this site a few days ago: http://www.castle.uk.co/castle/front.htm

RiscOS? What is that? Can anyone tell? No conclusive info on this site on what it is.

[Gooseberry Clock]

Looks like they sell Acorn Archimedes clones.

[psyjax]

These machines are so low-end. What's up?

Obsolete before they were up to date.

[ravuya]

RiscOS is a very popular operating system in backbone jobs. It doesn't require much in the way of hardware to get massive performance returns. It's one of the better written OS's on the planet.

The reason why it isn't popular is because it's RISC and won't run on the x86 platform.

[ravuya]

There's lots of cheap hardware for them. The OS, from what I've heard and seen, is kind of like Mac OS 7.5, except with UNIX-level stability and less personality (and a Dock).

I'd try it out, but the hardware investment is a bit much.

[ May 09, 2002: Message edited by: Ravuya ]

[ May 09, 2002: Message edited by: Ravuya ]

[Calum]

This  Slym looks really cool!

and this laptop looks pretty smart too although a bit behind its time...

This RiscOS.org site that Ravuya posted seems really good, and they have a list of retailers in their "Hardware" section.

Here's one site offering a Risc computer for

[voidmain]

On a RISC processor (reduced instruction set) the Mhz ratings have absolutely no comparison to the Mhz ratings on x86 based processors. They can do much more per cycle. I remember when we got our first IBM RS/6000s back around 1993 with the Power2 chips, the computational power blew anything else away yet the Mhz ratings were nothing to be excited about. We quickly migrated applications off our mainframe and onto the RS/6000 cluster. Ever hear of "Deep Blue" (IBM RS/6000 SP2)? Now I don't know how the RISC processors mentioned in this thread compare to the type I used to use but I can certainly say the Mhz ratings can't be compared to x86 Mhz ratings.

[psyjax]

Even tho, coming from a MacOS background, we have been using RISC processors for years. A 233MHz RISC chip is something like a first generation iMac. Which, BTW, is still a great machine, but is no AMD/Intel killer.

[voidmain]

Yes but I don't think the RISC processor architecture in the Mac was much like the IBM implementation.  Here's a good sheet on the RS/6000 processors:

http://www.mhpcc.edu/training/workshop/ibmhwsw/MAIN.html

Notice the one I was working with in 1993 (Power2) only operated at 66.6 MHz but performance was 254 MFLOPS. What do you have on a 1993 model Mac RISC processor? At that time they were running 6 instructions per clock cycle and I don't see it on that sheet but I believe it had a 256 bit data bus. Weren't the Macs running the PowerPC?  IBM had low end machines running the early versions of the PowerPC chip but they couldn't hold a candle to the performance of the Power2 chips. Power2 had many times the performance.

[ May 09, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[cahult]

The first Mac with a RISC-processor was Power Mac 6100/60 (60 MHz). It was introduced in early 1994. Someone once said to me that it was the equivalent of a Pentium 75 MHz.

[voidmain]

And around that time I remember writing some of my own benchmark tests in C and running both on the RS/6000s and on the fastest PCs we had available running Linux. Things like calculating PI out to 100,000 decimal places for instance. Both floating point and integer type tests and I remember the results were drastic. For instance a test that may take 30 seconds on the RS/6000 could take 30 minutes or more on the PC. Granted, my tests were not scientific but the same code, compiler, and optimization flags were used on both machines.

[cahult]

IBM may not be the best of companies but they can build computers, can

[voidmain]

You can guess where we ran our password crack programs...  

[dbl221]

I used the RS/600 AIX boxen for many years and they
performed well enough except when we were doing the
gated-cardiac 3D studies....man they would just slow
down to a crawl.....ah!  good times... good times.