Who'll do the "da Vinci" workstation, then?

NB: This thread is started in the earnest hope that those who work on porting RISC OS to C will contribute to it, see what can be done and who can do what, and those who wish to aid in realizing this project. The cherry is what hardware one may expect RO64 can use to the max and beyond if the work is done right.

Now that it’s established that RISC OS is being ported to C, the only question validating or negating realization of the topic (plus – will it sell like hotcakes?) is 1) Will it support multicore CPUs, 2) Will it support multithreading, 3) how about preemptive multitasking, ideally also 4) multi-CPU/SoC systems. If it’s four out of four here it’s a go, provided the port can use libraries like Mesa, OpenGL, OpenMAX and Vulkan and so on to fully utilize Arm GPUs like the awesome Immortalis G715 (which has support for Vulkan v.1-3). This will obviously no longer be RISC OS as we know it save for the GUI/WIMP system which should stay unchanged – drag & drop everything, middle-click to bring up menu, F12 to give command line and so on. Hence no to little change from a desktop user’s perspective except for the massively increased performance, of course.

So why “da Vinci”? Acorn used Archimedes as the name for their most innovative computer to date (why they chose the rather dull “Risc PC” as a follow-up is beyond me). To continue the “Great European Technological Thinkers” naming convention Leonardo pops up as a natural, and “da Vinci” has a certain ring to it plus it connotes a multidisciplinary mode. This will be fitting since it’ll be a workstation which will be perfect for 2D/3D/animation/video visual arts creation and editing plus audio creation and editing. Much of this will probably require new software to be written because of massively expanded possibilities and options in multi-media creation.

It takes the two-CPU system used in the Risc PC a bit further, enabling 4 to 6 CPUs/SoCs to be installed which RISC OS 64 can use to the max (provided “4 out of 4”, see above) and as such be able to compete favorably with high-end systems for other OS platforms when half populated. The best SoC to use to date may be the https://i.mediatek.com/dimensity-9200 (1) from a standalone performance view, but it does not have provisions to be in a multi-CPU/SoC system. This may pose a challenge to those who will design the motherboard and its multi-SoC row, enabling buses between the SoCs with a minimum of bottlenecks and retail price hike. Maybe do provisions for a two-SoC laptop version too? da Vinci Voyager?

Expansion slots for video/audio cards etc. should be PCIe (yeah, drivers..) and there should be two HDMI 2.1a ports and four USB4 ports to support external devices. Since the support for USB in RISC OS is said to be wobbly this can be a chance to get it right. The same goes for HDMI (multi-screen support).

With this rabid-performance workstation one may expect legacy software to run at more than adequate speed under emulation, but natively written software will do even better. This relies on the development of a brand new SDK including a compiler capable of 64-bi compiling – a given because it’s running in a 64-bit system one should think.

If we get RISC OS 64 by and by, this is the sort of hardware we’d expect to see it running on in Q4 2023. Right? Otherwise, the fastest consumer-level hardware RISC OS 64 could run on is sundry Arm-based RPis and Chromebooks which the fully populated da Vinci would beat hands down on raw performance. Anyway, a separate platform must have custom-built hardware to earn the “platform” designation in full. The da Vinci can ensure this in an innovative way!

Also, having both 64-bit RISC OS and the da Vinci workstation can as implied encourage the RISC OS developers to cooperate on developing a new complete and programmer friendly 64-bit capable SDK/E to take advantage of the new ArmnV9 architecture and its exciting new features. If this happens, it can occasion a true revival for RISC OS. Bring it where it should be, better late than never.

Last, let’s mention that this system a bit modified with a simplified GUI also can be used to build a very-high-performance mass market Gamer Console.

(1) Or the https://www.mediatek.com/products/chromebooks/mediatek-kompanio-1380 (if it had the G715 GPU..)

Out of curiosity, are you doing any of this work?

All this sounds very promising. By the time that the Da Vinci workstation is up and running, I might even have got the window redraw in my BASIC program right. Imagine the power!

> Out of curiosity, are you doing any of this work?

I’m not a programmer, but a user who’d like to see and use a modern version of the most productive operating system he’s ever used.

I’m not a programmer

Oh, any skills in PCB design? Hardware design? Computer retail? Marketing? Anything related to the ideas you have?

but a user who’d like to see and use a modern version of the most productive operating system he’s ever used.

As you appear to have made a rather fundamental mistake (in another thread) with regards to the size of the user-base ~100,000 ¹, I think you will be disappointed. The current reasonably-active/purchasing user-base is likely in the range of ~1,000.

¹ This was the approximate size at the end of Acorn in 1998.

>> I’m not a programmer

> Oh, any skills in PCB design? Hardware design? Computer retail? Marketing?
> Anything related to the ideas you have?

Heh, marketing? It’s a good name. Pretty recognizable. And from its description, don’t you find it rather desirable? As for the other skills you mention – don’t you think I’d mention it if I had them? Can’t see you contributing constructively to this thread with such irrelevant comments.

As to current user base I extrapolated that from the number of companies still active developing RISC OS hardware and software and the approximate user base it takes to support them. Anyway, with no new dedicated state-of-the-art hardware in nearly 30 years, do you expect the user base to grow?! :/

Why would the hardware have to be dedicated? Besides, people use operating systems to access their financial dealings. Why would they do that if you could “root” the OS by declaring a variable or calling OS_EnterOS?

> Why would the hardware have to be dedicated? Besides, people use operating systems
> to access their financial dealings. Why would they do that if you could “root” the
> OS by declaring a variable or calling OS_EnterOS?

If you read the spex of the MediaTec Dimensity 9200 carefully you’ll see that it’s suitable to Chromebooks too – the SoC contains Arm Cortex-X3/A715 plus the Immortalis G715 and in a 4-6 SoC configuration it can become a very powerful DTP/GFX/audio-centric workstation. It can pull the RISC OS world into the 64-bit world, which isn’t too late. 32-bit is dead, realize that. Even your phone is 64-bit, get real.

“da Vinci” has a certain ring to it

I think da Vinci would be a ghastly name for a computer. If Archimedes is a good name then Leonardo would be OK. But it carries the stink of marketroid pseudo-intellectual fantasy, a desire to exploit cheaply the lustre of another. It would remind one of a certain lowbrow popular work of fiction, best left on the shelves of airport bookshops.

I think you missed my point. The Wimp is great, if dated, but the underlying OS isn’t up to performing the tasks people today require of an OS. It’s totally insecure.

As to 64-bitting it, I would start by using or developing a 64-bit micro-kernel and running existing RO code in a virtual machine, with or without emulation.

At the same time, I would drop all support for low-colour modes (maybe translate ECFs to full RGB), and we’ve probably skipped the whole era of swapping memory to disc.

I think da Vinci would be a ghastly name for a computer.

I agree. It’s horribly pretentious.

How about we just call it Steve?

If Archimedes is a good name then Leonardo would be OK.

According to Vladimir Nabokov a ‘Leonardo’ is American slang for a crook, or a counterfeiter (The Leonardo, Berlin 1933).
That would somehow be a good name indeed, for a computer that still remains to be seen, to put it mildly.

As to 64-bitting it, I would start by using or developing a 64-bit micro-kernel and running existing RO code in a virtual machine, with or without emulation.

Exactly – although I wouldn’t even countenance writing something new. Using something that already exists is eminently more sensible than reinventing the wheel. Essentially what Apple did when they rejiggled NeXTSTEP to be OSX and kept MacOS compatibility in there.

Thanks Gaving for pointing out about Leonardo’s “lastname”.

As usual you’re galloping along to criticize form instead of content. Leonardo da Vinci (from Vinci; same as German von) was a primary and classical Renaissance person whose wide range of talents are legendary to this day, first and foremost with the awesome painting Mona Lisa.

If you wish to criticize anything, go ahead on the technical idea – it’s after all a rough sketch and is very open to improvements and more detail. DDR5 RAM on the SoC’s or on the motherboard? Shape of the box (industrial designer job) and so on. And the proposed features of RISC OS 64 – are you in completely agreement there with what I wrote? Go for solutions and not irrelevant criticism.

I expect that old hands will not be surprised that I am leading them astray again, from computers to words. In 1550 only 31% of heads of households in Florence were identified by a hereditary family name. The rest had their father’s first name, with occupation, place-name or nickname. Only 5% of women had family names. The movement towards the modern system of naming took place at different speeds in different parts of Europe. Even by 1852 the Registrar-General’s Annual Report stated that in outlying regions of the UK hereditary family names were by no means universal. In Rome the modern system was universal by 1650, but in the south of Italy it was rather later.

Sorry Sveinung. I am not trying to criticize you but the use of da Vinci for Leonardo da Vinci .

Gavin, ok. Like I wrote, the name is not the primary factor here – that’s getting RISC OS a jour with contemporary operating systems and the computers they run on. The benefit of using Arm CPUs apart from pretty good performance is the battery issue as applied to laptops – it’s a winner there. High time the RISC OS Tribe truly took advantage of these competitive factors.

How about we just call it Steve?

How about Simon (or is that too simple?) or maybe “Rick OS Machine” – OK, I’ll get my coat, could be gone for a while, and it’s chilly out.

That one never gets old.

That one never gets old.

“Simple Simon” or “could be gone for a while, and it’s chilly out”?

Think it’s the first time I’ve seen a thread go offtopic from the first reply and stay that way. Must be silly season. As if what I describe wouldn’t be.. nice.

Wibble

As if what I describe wouldn’t be.. nice.

I agree, it would be nice, but the proposal is also very unrealistic, which might be why no-one is taking it seriously.

To elaborate, there are four main things to bear in mind that would make this feel more plausible rather than just wishful thinking.

• There are more important features that the average user would care about, which is where most of the effort is currently going towards. It’s all well and good having RISC OS run on the most powerful machines , but if it doesn’t have things like WiFi or UTF-8 file names or modern web browsers, then the general public is still going to ignore it.
• Quite a few elements in your proposal don’t actually have anything to do with 64-bit RISC OS, and are major tasks in and of themselves so it just makes the proposal bloated and harder to accomplish by lumping everything together. It would be better to have it focus on one thing only, and create separate proposals for any additional goals like OpenGL or accelerated video decoding, since then each one can progress independently of each other.
• There’s no real rush, since the Raspberry Pi Foundation has committed to manufacturing most current models until January 2026, and I can’t imagine the supply of AArch32 devices immediately drying up after that point. It’s not like many things on RISC OS are seriously pushing the limits of the hardware we have already, so I can easily see most of the RISC OS crowd being content with the Raspberry Pi 4 well into the 2040s, and the non-RISC OS crowd will take more convincing to move away from Windows, Mac OS X or Linux than just RISC OS being able to do what they can do with their existing setups.
• Q4 2023? Really? This is a pretty massive undertaking that you’re proposing, and there are only a limited number of people who are both interested and able to work on it full time. This is also why it would be better to provide code or hardware design or project management or something tangible, rather than just telling us that you want a next generation RISC OS with 64-bit and brand new APIs and everything rewritten from scratch and custom-designed hardware and laptops and 69,105 GHz processors and Impression and USB4 and multi-monitor and multi-threading and multi-SoC and Vulkan and Crysis and Blender and Vegas and 8K YouTube and sea bass with lasers and you want it NOW!

This isn’t to say that this thread is without value, since there is some genuinely useful stuff in that I really want to see happen (namely OpenGL and OpenMAX), it’s just that a singular mega-proposal isn’t the best way to encourage people to contribute with technical expertise.

Cameron, thanks for a relevant reply. I’m aware the totality of this project is pretty awesome, but split into parts where those most suited to do certain parts (core dev., module dev.) can join up and distribute the specific tasks among themselves. This obviously need project management, a job I’m eminently non-suited to (being a project developer/communicator). This has to be done, to lay the foundation for a RISC OS hardware revival, not just be content with piddling along on a single core on a RPi card – in 2040. That’s reactionary. With that attitude we’d still be stuck with oil lamps and steam engines provided we’d ever got out of damp and drafty caves.

THERE IS NO MONEY