Re: "Device not ready" (CDBurn)

Glenn Richards wrote:
To be fair, even 10 years ago Acorn was way ahead in terms of user interface, quality of applications, system usability etc. In 1995 I wouldn't use anything else. And when the StrongARM came out Acorn left all other desktop systems trailing. 

This was also my impression. And one of the most important reasons
for this impression was IMHO that the hardware was not so far behind
the "PC" market than it is now - integer performance of the 200 MHz SA
was not that much worse than the Pentiums of the same age (IIRC,
when the SA came out, the Pentium 233 MMX was pretty much top of the
line, with the Pentium Pro being the "high end much cache" option,
and the PII with up to 300 MHz being extremely expensive).

Sadly it all went wrong. It's amazing to think where Acorn would be now if they hadn't given up and gone home. Even when Acorn threw in the towel in 1998 they were streets ahead of Microsoft and Apple, M$ didn't catch up until Win2K (ignoring the abomination that is ME).

And unfortunately RISC OS hardware has now been overtaken. The Iyonix would have been brilliant had it come out in 1999, but it was 2-3 years too late. It feels sluggish compared to a modern XP system, or even a Mac running OS X. 

And this highlights the single most important problem of the RISC OS
market today (IMHO of course).

From an abstract point of view, yes, the IYONIX was 2-3 years late.
But there was no adequate ARM-compatible processor available in
1999 that would be in any way comparable with the IOP XScales.

There were lots of announcements of "really fast ARM really soon" -
I remember the Samsung "Halla" (1.2 GHz ARM10 variant) and "Sorak"
(3 GHz) announcements. However, the fastest available Samsung ARM
is still the miserable 533 MHz ARM9 variant, which powers the
A9 Home (in its 400 MHz guise - interestingly, the 533 MHz part
is still not available in the general market unless you are prepared
to buy a significant amount). And the fastest XScale variant is
a network processor whose core runs at 1 GHz, but is not very well
suited for an IYONIX-like desktop computer.

With currently available processors, the best possible desktop machine
for an OKish price would be based on the IOP333. Clock frequency
is certainly not everything, but we would have an increase of
30% compared to the IOP321 inside the IYONIX - after 4 years! Because
of the much better RAM speed of the IOP333, it is likely that the
overall speed increase might even reach 100%, but even that would
be nothing compared to x86 world. And we should try to catch up,
not merely slowing down the ever-opening gap!

And all this has not yet tapped into the realms of the FP problem.

Compare all those "processor availability" restrictions to the
developments in the PC market - in 1997, a 200 MHz StrongARM had
to go against a 233 Pentium, now an 800 MHz IOP333 would have to
go against a dual core 3,6 GHz P4 or a 4000+ Athlon 64...

I am quite sure that, if the ARMs would have kept pace with their
x86 counterparts, the RISC OS market would be in a much healthier
state (well, it would have helped if Acorn would have done the
32bitting/HAL work Pace has done somewhere around 1997!) now.

At the end of the day, compared to the "RISC OS processor problem",
I think everything else discussed in this thread (like the
CMT vs. PMT evergreen) is not of significant importance.

Steffen

--
Steffen Huber
hubersn Software - http://www.hubersn-software.com/
.

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