RISC OS London Show, Sat 24th October 2015

can probably run VRPC as fast or faster than any native hardware

Urban legend: my 1.5 GHz PandaBoard run RISC OS much faster than my 3.2 GHz Core i7 computer (around 2,5 time). So I would say that for the same price, you’ll get a vastly slower VRPC computer :)

For ARMX6 comparison, it’s not fair either. Here we’ll have dual head, more Sata, more Ethernet, twice the Power, DSP and Linux. For desktop users, all of this is no use. For developers, it’s a bit different. Some already switched to OMAP5 :)

But I agree too: for classic users, ARMX6 is better.

you’ll need to be pretty dedicated to the platform to go with the Titanium IMHO

Let’s face it: people with no special interest in RISC OS or ARM processors (as business or leisure) don’t have any reason to buy a RISC OS computer.

I’ve already decided that my next computer is going to be a PiTop.

Grumpf. As usual, only QWERTY keyboard.

If the bare board is going to be €1000 (or £1000, which is even worse)… then my point about legitimate ARM server boards comes back into play, for using this with Linux.

Sorry but no. Once more time, you just look at the price. You compared a mainstream motherboard with an HDK included services. Try to buy the same X-Gene board as an HDK. Not the same price at all. It’s not because a PC @ 3GHz cost 1000 euros than a server @ 2 GHz can’t cost 25000 euros and than a Xeon SDK can’t cost 1 million euros. We’re just compare apple and orange here. But you’re right: Titanium IS NOT for classic markets and classic consumers. Raspberry Pi is.

Anyway, thanks for the link. That’s of course a very good product :)

There were some interesting looking robotics being demonstrated on one table but I did not stay long enough to find out what was controlling them.

They were all controlled from R-Pis running RO 5.21.
Robotics usually requires running RO single-tasking for speed or near real-time pulse streams. I therefore put quite a lot of effort into each prog’s display interface – outline fonts, decent graphics and colour themes etc. The result often looks more like a Linux app, so it’s not surprising a lot of people wondered what was running the machines. All my control progs and graphics are written in plain old BBC Basic.

All my control progs and graphics are written in plain old BBC Basic.

Great :)

As for pegging it to Acorn’s price policy

Why even mention this? Acorn boxes were pricey¹ all the way along, moreso when PCs started to become commonplace and you could pick up two and a half of them for the price of a RiscPC. So really making comparisons to Acorn pricing is like saying “this thing costs a lot”. Hmmm…

¹ Said as somebody who had to extract teeth from chickens in order to justify why an expensive Beeb was better than a crappy ZX81.

I really don’t know why we should be surprised that a low volume high quality product, something that we excel at producing in Britain, should be more expensive than a low quality mass volume product. The point is we now have a choice across the spectrum between RAspberry Pi, ARMX6 and Titanium. This is the best it could be! ROOL have done an excellent job and have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in their endeavours over the last 9 years.

Having now had a look at the Titanium spec (brief-ti22/pdf) it’s clear that the machine is intended for the most demanding end of the user spectrum, where price is less likely to be the main issue. It should certainly outperform all other RO platforms by a wide margin*. I agree entirely that the hardware situation is unimaginably rosy compared to 2006, and that ROOL’s work on RISC OS 5 has been crucial in this regard, for which we should all be (and I certainly am) properly grateful!
(*looking forward to an update here: https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/466?page=12)

I can’t update the benchmarks until I get my hands on a Titanium board and they are not yet on sale…

I really don’t know why we should be surprised that a low volume high quality product, something that we excel at producing in Britain, should be more expensive than a low quality mass volume product.

We could always consider the Apple approach? Designed with love in Basingstoke; built by slaves lower paid workers in Shuangzong Province…

The point is we now have a choice across the spectrum between RAspberry Pi, ARMX6 and Titanium. This is the best it could be!

Indeed it is. In fact, since we have good coverage of the lower price end as well as the higher, I’m wondering if we aren’t better off now than when Acorn were around.
I think perhaps the only omission that RISC OS has is there is no presence at all in the tablet arena. Touchscreens. Ooooh, that’s a whole different kettle of fish! (^_^)

ROOL have done an excellent job and have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in their endeavours over the last 9 years.

Very much so. I was pleased to see the Iyonix come to fruition, not because I am pro or anti any specific faction, but more because it was the first serious post-Acorn design that wasn’t just “another RiscPC-alike” (as in something based upon the ARM7500). I was already well aware that 26 bit was no longer supported, and that RISC OS would need to evolve. Castle brought this evolution, but sadly were stopped short by RoHS. Seems funny considering the utter crap that comes from China that is supposedly CE and RoHS. But I guess the rules just don’t favour the small guys that play by the rules…
Following that, ROOL was formed and some of the source was released. I looked, mostly out of curiosity. I wasn’t interested in building my own at that time as my most recent machine was an ARM710 RiscPC. I figured maybe in a while (a long while!) I might be able to pick up a recon Iyonix from CJE or something (that’s where my RiscPC came from).

Then came the news that not only was the source to RISC OS sufficient to build it, but also it was working on a Beagleboard. This was a big step forward as instead of building a machine to suit RISC OS, RISC OS was taken to the machine. And a “generic” ARM dev board at that. I could see where this was going and it became interesting again. The next board that the Beagle guys made was the xM which was even more powerful and even more expensive. It is at this point that I entered the show, having been gifted an xM – and now having a proper OS to run on it (I don’t consider a botched build of Angstrom to be “proper”).
While my xM is hooked to the s-video output (digital through VGA adaptor is extremely tempermental), the scale of behaviour between a 16MiB 40MHz ARM710 RiscPC and the 1GHz 512MiB Beagle xM really has to be experienced to be believed. Not only that, but the thing worked with modern day peripherals. No looking for a special mouse, and transferring data via floppy disc or tediously slow 10baseT ethernet. This was ethernet that kept up with my PC and USB sticks.

Lurking in the background was the idea of the RaspberryPi. I’d seen and heard it all before. A fully functional “computer” the size of a USB key, for a dirt cheap price. Yeah, yeah. Such a thing didn’t exist, and I’m not sure it does even now. For a start, a “computer” is useless without decent I/O and there is little scope for that in a pendrive sized device. I think the Pi guys realised that, as the ideas were abandoned and the concept refined to be a credit-card sized gizmo.
Now, yes, I get it. A quarter GiB of RAM and a has-been mobile graphics chip with an old not-so-fast ARM core attached. This isn’t a SoC that is going to set the world on fire.
Only it did. Not through blazing speed (although, slow as it might be at running a browser under Debian, it is more than competent with HD video), but through the virtue of nailing the price to the floor. We aren’t being milked to keep shareholders and CEOs happy, this machine is basically costing us only a mite more than it cost them to build it. And in doing so, proved that it was actually possible to create a functional ARM dev board for less than one day’s pay at minimum wage, or maybe a few weeks worth of pocket money for a child. This was affordable, and there was little else to compete as everybody was aiming for the bigger-and-better market – like that 4+4 core ARM board with a price tag that is up there with the eBay asking price of BBC turtles and 2nd processors.
And, by damn, RISC OS ran on it. Not only that, but RISC OS – as simple and insecure as it may be – was designed to run on the ARM processor in an era when it was normal to write entire operating systems in assembler (instead of C as is usual these days).
It shows. I’m using RISC OS in less time than it takes Debian to figure out what hardware is attached, never mind all the rest of the boot rubbish. It is at this point where people usually say that I’m not comparing like with like. Fair enough, but it is an operating system that I wish to use to look at web pages, play streaming radio, write some documents. Blah blah. I can do that on Debian (I presume there is some sort of Office-like WP for it?) and I can do that on RISC OS with trusty OvationPro. It’s just, well, one system boots in like 16 seconds, the other……doesn’t. There’s no point running half a dozen daemon in the background if I have no intention of ever telnetting into the box. So, yes, it is like for like. One is big, complicated, and necessarily slow. One is simple, small, and fast.

And here, I think, is where ROOL could really stretch their wings. Others too. Now cost was not such a great barrier. You see, I probably never would have bought the xM myself. The price it would have cost me would have bought a lowish end netbook that would have been newer and better than the EeePC that I have now. But with the Pi and its various incarnations, it is a different story. I am thinking of picking up a Pi2 and Vonets WiFi dodah in the Spring and using this Pi as my dedicated server. The Pi2 will become my RISC OS box. The server won’t need a keyboard or mouse or display (unless it goes wrong) so I can simply recycle those to the Pi2. A faster more modern QUAD CORE ARM for… remind me again, how much is the Pi2? For a QUAD CORE processor? Really, you just gotta sit down to properly process it. A QUAD CORE and it not only costs less than a budget PC, it costs less than a budget scanner!
And, hey, guess what. RISC OS is there too.

If it wasn’t for the fact that our market seems to be the same dozen faces, I’d almost be inclined to say “we haven’t had it so good”.
No only has RISC OS failed to fizzle away like, say, AmigaOS (the original one, not the one that calls itself that these days); but we’re running happily on contemporary hardware; we’re mostly (resolver excepted) completely open source; and players in the market are bringing new hardware to life (and we all stand to benefit from this – RISC OS now knows what SATA is).
We’re still here, we’re still going, and we’re still blissfully doing things our own damned way. So, nerr. ;-)

And all of this from a has-been platform of a company that died before the millennium. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Want reasons to be happy and optimistic? Like I said, I wonder if we haven’t had it so good. More choice. More supported hardware (please, somebody, WiFi next!). More potential.

We could always consider the Apple approach? Designed with love in Basingstoke; built by slaves lower paid workers in Shuangzong Province…

Interesting that Pi production started out there and moved to a small province in the west¹ to improve build quality among other things.

¹ Generally referred to as Wales

I really don’t know why we should be surprised that a low volume high quality product, something that we excel at producing in Britain, should be more expensive than a low quality mass volume product.

Are there known quality issues with the Wandboard?

No, it’s a good product. But of course, mainstream quality, not business/industry.

be more expensive than a low quality mass volume product.

low quality mass volume product == Raspberry Pi (not to denigrate the Pi though) perhaps ‘low quality’ is wrong – I mean ‘adequate performance’ probably.

The wandboard has a guaranteed 10year production?support? cycle. Specifically because it’s in industrial use.
Or that’s what I’ve been told.
There is a huge difference between business quality (usually complete rubbish tbh) and enterprise. But example would be a multiplier of 100 and 10000 on cost – depending on the quality compared to business standards. Mil spec can be similar (or higher)

Posted in error. System won’t let me delete it.

The wandboard has a guaranteed 10year production?support? cycle. Specifically because it’s in industrial use.

The processor, yes. The board, I don’t know. Anyway, sorry, I made a short cut. I wanted to say business quality for quality+time+services.

A slightly belated thank you to all the visitors, exhibitors, helpers and developers who made it such a great show :-)

Videos of the theatre talks are now on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/lptw1/videos

A transcript of a longer version of Paul Fellows history of RISC OS talk is here – http://rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2012/PaulFellows/index.html

Bryan.

Thank you Bryan and all the helpers. It wouldn’t happen without you.

The date for next year’s show has been set, exactly a year in advance :-)

Put Saturday 29th October 2016 in your diary now!

Elesar’s shop is now showing the pricing information for the bare Titanium board.

http://shop.elesar.co.uk/

Just under £500 with VAT, so not as bad as some people were expecting, but not exactly cheap either.

Compared to the 4GB IGEPv5 it’s a bit over twice as much (IGEPv5 €275 ex-VAT, Titanium €584 ex-VAT). With Titanium you’ll get half the amount of RAM as the IGEP, but on the flip side you get lots more IO, so a higher price isn’t too unexpected. But hopefully the price won’t put too many people off, and hopefully it will come down a bit with subsequent production runs (IIRC the IGEPv5 started off at a higher price too).

Titanium is – for me – more an HDK, with code to use Cortex M4 and DSP.
Price is OK if dual screen & dual boot is available.

Dual screen could be possible in limited way, before complete integration under RISC OS.
Essential for me.

Dual Boot is not really possible, but a tool to load Linux kernel with right parameters could be done.
A good way to mix RISC OS and Linux on the same motherboard.

2 GB is a limit for desktop Linux use. But if we have zram on the kernel…

I see the USB3 sources have been checked in to CVS – nice. With that and sata something better than a pi will be a must have soon.

…does it mean we have now USB3 support on the available OMAP5 Boards like IGEPv5 and TI EVM ?

Looks like it has just been added to titanium.

I’m late to the party, but wanted to thank Bryan and all his helpers for making the London show a very nice visit. Went down with my brother, and we really enjoyed ourselves. The buzz in the show was infectious. Got to meet Anthony Bartram, he’s doing sterling work with the games he’s putting together.

Time ran out before we got a chance to see everything.

And all of this from a has-been platform of a company that died before the millennium. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Now, we’re just being greedy. We already conquered the world with the ARM processor. To have done the same with RISC OS, would have been like putting lightning in a bottle. Twice. :-)