Preview of a whole new RISC OS platform
Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 23 Oct 2015 12:03:00 GMT
Visitors to the London show this weekend may wish to drop by the ROOL stand to take a sneak peek at a brand new Cortex-A15 motherboard designed with RISC OS in mind, which has kindly been loaned to ROOL for the duration of the show.
Pedal to the metal with Titanium
The new board, codename Titanium, it’s brought to you by Cambridge based Elesar Limited and utilises a dual core Cortex-A15 to make light work of most computational tasks. Although one of the A15’s currently sits idle under RISC OS, there are also two dedicated digital signal processors (DSPs) and two dual core Cortex-M4’s waiting for an eager developer to press into action – come and talk to the ROOL crew about your ideas for extending RISC OS to use multiple processing cores.
The standard ATX form factor brings out dual DVI video heads, dual gigabit Ethernet, DDR3 memory, stereo audio, two serial ports, plus 6 USB ports at the rear panel and 2 more USB ports on the front panel (when housed in a conventional PC case).
Internally four high speed SATA ports connect any combination of ATAPI optical drive (DVD-ROM or CD-ROM), hard disc or solid state disc. These are tied together by a ground-up rewrite of ADFS by Piccolo Systems in the more portable C programming language.
Booting from dedicated flash memory keeps the OS ROM secure and leaves the micro SD card socket free for users. The critical OS configuration settings are retained in dedicated CMOS memory, along side the battery backed real time clock.
The RISC OS Open project
The ground work for supporting these modern ARM cores is one of the key changes made to RISC OS in recent years, using the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) to decouple everyone’s favourite OS from the Acorn custom chipset.
More big roadworks are already underway with RISC OS 5.23, including improving system workspace protection by moving zero page on a path to enabling multi core and multi head support amongst other things.
The new ADFS is jointly sponsored by Elesar, CJE Micros, R-Comp Interactive and due to be deployed on their ARMX6 and IGEPv5 too. This significant milestone finally brings a native serial ATA solution to RISC OS, and by handling the commonplace ATA commandset can also be back ported to the Iyonix and Risc PC family which use the older parallel ATA.
Titanium also makes use of the new RGB colour layout graphics added in RISC OS 5.22, allowing it to support both true colour 4k/32k/64k/16M colour modes as well as paletted 1bpp/2bpp/4bpp colours.
We’d also love to hear from any potential bounty claimants who may be interested in trying to get the hidden USB3 port going – there’s nearly £2000 collecting at the date of going to press.
Buying Titanium
Production units are undergoing a final battery of tests prior to release, and are expected to start shipping in the next few weeks. Elesar are only able to provide the naked circuit board, both R-Comp Interactive and CJE Micros are gearing up to present details and pricing of complete systems for their customers.
The ultra low power design, especially when coupled with an SSD, makes selection of a suitable power supply a challenge – your RISC OS retailer will of course provide a matched set along with suitably qualified peripherals.
Exciting times! Congratulations to all involved.
There was me thinking CJE were going down the A15 route, whilst RCI were iMX6. Not so simple. And nice to see some co-operation in the RISC OS world.
Blogged about this exciting news for the German readers:
http://riscosblog.huber-net.de/2015/10/4-mal-cortex-a15-fuer-risc-os/
“…motherboard designed with RISC OS in mind…”
Always funny to see sentences like these.
They probably mean: we found a development board “designed with linux- and/or Android-development in mind” that is more or less capable of running RISC OS.
Especially when a few lines down the article there’s: “…one of the A15’s currently sits idle under RISC OS, there are also two dedicated digital signal processors (DSPs) and two dual core Cortex-M4’s waiting for an eager developer…”
Stop doing this guys. You only ridicule yourselves. At least RCI admitted that they use the WandBoard and adapted RISCOS for it (not the Wandboard is designed with RISCOS in mind).
Apologies if I step (again) on someone’s toes. New tech is always welcome although I fear that this is becomming a pissing contest between every half-capable developer to get (the base of) RISCOS running on as many boards as possible. Why not adopt one board and make it work to the fullest before welcoming another one?
I am sure that ROOL would not use the phrase “new Cortex-A15 motherboard designed with RISC OS in mind” unless it were true.
Manu, please check who is the man behind Elesar Ltd., maybe you change your opinion. Titanium is not “yet-another-off-the-shelf-dev-board”.
BTW, nobody said that the SoC was specifically designed with RISC OS in mind. If you find a similarly-specced and documented SoC that has only one core, do not hesitate to tell us.
“Manu, please check who is the man behind Elesar Ltd”
That would be main man and sole owner/shareholder :)
I think the Linux build version is included to widen the market for the board rather than RO being an addition
ROOL’s press release looks right; that it was designed with RISC OS in mind.
An easy physical check on their claim is to look at PL203 (page 20 of the TRM) which is labelled “CMOS lock” on the silkscreen, a hat tip to the protection link on the Risc PC and Iyonix.
This is Steve here, speaking IMO, and not speaking as ROOL:
The Titanium board was designed by a leading RISC OS supporter primarily as a RISC OS desktop motherboard but with the consideration that it’s a small market and so ensuring it can also run Linux is a sensible move to attempt to recover that not inconsiderable capex/effort. It’s fantastic to see some bona fide new hardware entering the RISC OS market – almost fifteen years after the Iyonix (incidentally designed by the same person).
I suspect this product was develeloped with the expectation of selling 50 times as many devices that would be used with Linux as RISC OS, but that is good.
Especially if it is a generic design, with added bits for RISC OS, which can be safely ignored by other OSes, so a special version isn’t required.
Providing it is easy to multiple boot, it sounds fantastic.