Are RISC OS folk meanies or just poor?

So why are you so apposed to 180nm, a process that can produce reasonably high enough end products. Or is it that you have a grudge against the hobbiest ASIC vendors?

Because the demand was for something better than you can buy today. A Raspberry Pi BCM2835 is 40nm, so is a lot faster than anything on 180nm (a lot more cache per mm2 for starters – chips like Athlon were enormous). Why would you do a $20K small-batch production run with say $50K of NRE (packaging, boards, assembly, IP macros for I/O) when you could just buy one of the millions of used Raspberry Pis out there for circa $20?

So you believe that a $25 BCM2835 will outperform that, running RISC OS?

Yes, substantially. What you have outlined is roughly a 1987 Archimedes in terms of functionality. The Raspberry Pi 1 is more or less a 2007 smartphone, and the Raspberry Pi 3 is a 2013 smartphone.

Questions:

• How much cache did you expect to provide in an acceptable transistor budget in 180nm? As a ballpark, a random paper I found cites 14 to 59 square microns per bit. For comparison, Pi1 has 1Mbit of cache.
• What off-chip memory technology are you planning to use? In 180nm you’re likely limited to SDRAM or DDR1. Those don’t come in large chips – say 128MB of 133MHz SDRAM?
• What about USB, networking, storage? The IP for those is large (in terms of area) and expensive (there are some open source cores, but nothing of quality that I’ve seen – the verification is the tricky bit). The PHYs are also not qualified for large process nodes. You might just about get USB 2.0 in 180nm, but you won’t get gigabit anything (so no SATA or PCIe). SD card should be OK, and ethernet can be an external chip like the Pi.
• If you don’t want USB, can you even buy PS/2 mice today? It also rules out external mass storage
• What about display? If you want to drive HDMI, you need gigabit signals again. You could add an external chip but that costs. VGA ports are a dying breed.

Again, it’s a lot of trouble to reproduce something worse than what you can buy today for pocket change.

So you can make all of these compromises, but unless you have $10K to spend on a hobby project and you’re going to do it just for fun (and a year or two of your time is free), who is going to buy this?

Greater potential per core per clock processing power (for non SIMD integer operations), smaller space usage, potentially equal clock speed, more versitile, and using better interfacing tech (way better than USB).

Can you point to me any SoC that’s achieving these things in an affordable technology? For example, SiFive’s Freedom E310 is 130nm, and is basically microcontroller class. Their Freedom U540 has an MMU and able to boot Linux (roughly equivalent to what RISC OS needs), but that’s 28nm.

Also, the microcontrollers are Thumb – they don’t include the 32 bit ARM instruction set. So as well as lacking an MMU, you’re going to have to translate the assembler parts to a different instruction set.

Don’t forget the initial question: what will happen when ARM SoC will all be 64-bit only?
I bet we’ll have solutions to use in the microcontroller market.

I don’t. You’re forgetting three things:

No. I said ‘slowly’

Don’t forget the initial question: what will happen when ARM SoC will all be 64-bit only?
I bet the microcontroller market will have evolved too.

Amber Core is designed around the ARM2 microarchitecture

No. ARMv2 instruction set, not covered by patents.

And even at 100MHz and a well thought out archetechure

Today.

While Amber Core is nice, with current FPGA technology it is just too slow to be a meaningful alternative for SoCs.

Today.

Why would you do a $20K small-batch production run with say $50K of NRE (packaging, boards, assembly, IP macros for I/O) when you could just buy one of the millions of used Raspberry Pis out there for circa $20?

Don’t forget the initial question: what will happen when ARM SoC will all be 64-bit only?
I bet that when it’ll be the case, a super ARMv3 Asic will be one the possibilities.

So my global answer is unchanged: ARM64 only movement is not a reality today and not a threat for tomorrow.

As Jeffrey once put it: nobody wants to tackle the hard things. I have to agree with that.

The problem is that all people with the required knowledge to work on such things is already here at work.
IMHO, it’s not a nobody problem, but a no one problem.

That’s why I suggest work on low end computers (SoC, µC or Amber): to attract the retro community.

@ DavidS

I keep hoping to have enough money to buy a new DDE

Quick reminders:

• If you need it to compile BBC BASIC apps with ABC I believe there was a free offer of a cut-down version of DDE.
• If you have a recent recent enough version you could email ROOL with your DEV code to get a discount for a new release

Not sure if this can help you, but I think it worth mentioning it, good luck in any case :)

I already had a BBC BASIC only version, lost along with everything else. So it would be wrong for me to ask the other David for another copy, better to get more people into it than using up the licenses he paid for.

Just send me your old and new email, then I’ll update my database and send you a copy of the archive.

[hmm, original message deleted? I didn’t notice any spam link, was it hidden behind a . or something?]

use their “stone age” machines

No, this is what some age technology can do (three quarters of the way down, search the page for “roche”). ;)

and TCP/IP stacks.

Apparently we will have two…

if more users in the RISC OS community could come together

People donate what they can to bounties, others help in other ways.

The problem is that the core OS is a big wodge of assembler, and it’s essentially a single process system, which complicates porting things from a POSIX world.

many modern applications require better technology and more up-to-date tools

Yes, and the problem is that with a lack of resources (developers and money), we’ll forever be playing catch up to never quite come close.

original message deleted

Regurgitating old content I thought. Beware the newbies!

[hmm, original message deleted? I didn’t notice any spam link, was it hidden behind a . or something?]

The email address was that of a well known spammer.

This thread (well, the originally intended topic of it, anyway) actually got me thinking a little while ago. It’s astounding that after several years away from RISC OS, I have been able to come back to an OS that is better than when I left, and that now runs on cheap, fast hardware and with developers still writing and/or maintaining useful stuff, often for free. It is, in fact, a more viable option to me now than several years ago and that is some achievement.

For those of us not developing the OS or major programs for it, then, ponying up at least a fiver each month for ROOL as guardian of the OS seems more than reasonable.

On a year you didn’t buy a £50 Raspberry Pi to run RISC OS on, that would come to £60 to use a RISC OS system for the year. People pay more than that to sit flicking through the dross on hundreds of TV channels each month.

It’s a hobby, isn’t it? You make a valid comparison with other activities, like TV subscriptions (I don’t use those things myself, but I see what you mean).

In case anyone doesn’t realise, there is a general ROOL bounty, and you can set up recurring donations: https://www.riscosopen.org/bounty/polls/42

In my case, I spend almost nothing on activities for myself. Family tends to come first, then there are so many things to do around the house. Inflation of the cost of essentials isn’t helping, either.

RISC OS being a hobby is a good way to frame it, actually. If one’s hobby was model aircraft, one wouldn’t expect someone to design it for free, and someone else to manufacture and charge nothing for that.

I know only too well the cost of having a house. It never ends, does it! Despite that, though, five or ten quid every month can be found to support the RISC OS effort.

ROOL could do also some more active advertisement for the bounties.
“Out of sight, out of mind”
Well technically there is no functionalty for that in this forum but maybe should post once in a while some “Support RISC OS: Donate for the ROOL Bounties” post in earch topic.