Acorn Archimedes
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Acorn Archimedes Fuelled by Acorns innovative ARM RISC processor, the Archimedes or A series offer workstation power and spectacular graphics abilities at PC prices. With their place in education already assured, Dick Pountain believes their speed may also guarantee them entry into the business world. 98 PCW AUGUST 1987 Ever since Acorn first announced the details of its ARM RISC processor chip it has been quite obvious, despite rather feeble denials from the company, that ARM was intended to power the successor to the venerable BBC Computer. ARMs designers quite openly stated their goal, which was to produce a 32bit replacement for the 6502, all the major competitors having been rejected as inadequate. When last year Acorn launched the Master, a slightly repackaged Beeb, it was received in the press with something approaching scorn, and many people expressed scepticism about whether Acorn had the wherewithall to do anything useful with ARM. With the launch of the Archimedes or ' A series of computers, we can see that the Master was merely a stopgap measure, and that behind the scenes One concession to industry standards is the Archimedes keyboard, which Aeorn was giving everything it had to offers both IBM PC and BBC Model B compatibility. Like the Model 300 it ARM technology. It has been well worth has red function keys, presumably to persuade BBC Model B owners to upgrade the wait. The A series machines offer to an Archimedes. A threebutton mouse is fitted as standard workstation power at personal computer prices, and they deliver this power to the ecute in a single clock cycle. Like the old handle up to eight sound channels in programmer in an easytouse way, 6502 which partly inspired it, it gets its stereo. The sound generation facility resulting in truly spectacular graphics speed from short instructions rather than provided is rather simple compared with abilities. fast clocks (the 4MHz clock yields roughly dedicated synthesiser chips like the It would be as well to clarify the status four MIPS). Indeed, it was designed Ensoniq, but fancy stuff can be done in of this Benchtest. At the time of writing, specifically to be usable with cheap software, exploiting the tremendous the production models A305, A310, A440 dynamie memory parts, unlike many new speed of the ARM. and the A410 were not quite finished. ultrafast processors which require The MEMC chip can address and Instead what Aeorn loaned to me was an astronomically expensive static RAM and refresh up to 4Mbytes of actual RAM, A500 Development System. This 25MHz clock rates to get their but also has the capability of translating machine, which is not on sale to the performance. This has been a major logical to physical addresses so that a public, is what Acorn uses for internal factor in allowing ARM to be the first ' 32Mbyte logical address space can be development of A series software, and super processor to find its way into a supported. This can be used to provide has been distributed to selected external massmarket micro. a diskbased virtual memory system, or software producers for some months. It Weve heard much less about the three to provide hardware memory protection has a very similar hardware specification peripheral chips which Acorn designed to for multitasking systems; that is, to that of the highend A410 model ( go with the ARM CPU, and which were stopping one task interfering with 20Mbyte hard disk, one floppy, 2Mbytes launched in late 1986. These are the anothers memory. As an aside: its been memory), though it uses the older ( VIDC Video Controller, the MEMC the lack of such hardware protection for 3micron process) versions of the ARM Memory Controller and the IOC the 68000 (Motorolas Memory Manager chips which are very slightly slower than Input/Output Controller. All four chips are having been hugely delayed) that has the 2micron production versions. The used in the A series machine architecture, hindered the development of serious system software I saw was at various forming a complete designer chip set. multitasking software on the Mac, ST stages of development; none was final The VIDC controls a colour display with and Amiga. and some sections were incomplete. one, two, four, or eight bits per pixel: that The MEMC doubles as a DMA You should, therefore, read this more is, from monochrome up to 256 colours. It controller which manages the buffers for as a preview than a review, and I shall includes a 16word colour lookup palette video, sound and cursor data. It is also point out various places where the which allows a choice from a total of 4096 the glue which sticks all the four chips production machines will differ from the colours, and has onchip digitaltoanalogue together, providing as it does the A500. You may also be confident that any converters to directly provide RGB processor clock signal and all other bias will be in the right direction; the signals. It also supports a hardware system timing signals. production machines will be better than cursor in up to three colours, and directly The IOC controls system interrupts that which I tested. controls VDU timing parameters in a and the system bus. It contains a programmable way. Its pixel rate is number of timers, a serial keyboard Hardware programmable between 824MHz (the rate interface and logic for talking to other Enough has been written about the Acorn at which the machine supplies information peripherals. ARM chip (in this magazine, by myself, to the screen). Its hard to translate that The importance of this allAcorn chip for one) that I shall only briefly describe directly into maximum screen resolution set is twofold. The careful packing of this new proeessor. It is a full 32bit because there are some tricks which functions into the four chips removes the processor of classic RISC (Reduced allow it to look like 96MHz in certain need for a lot of socalled glue logic and Instruction Set) design. It uses 27 32bit circumstances; briefly, it can support a so keeps the overall chip count low. But registers and a small instruction set of 44 1024x1024 highresolution mono display, also the chips are optimised to work simple instructions, almost all of which ex 640x256 in 256 colours or 640x512 in 16 together, using pipelining and other colours. tricks to maximise the performance of Rather surprisingly the VIDC also the whole combination. There is no provides the Sound Controller. It can compromise due to mismatch with other peoples chips, and this shows in the performance. Practically all that is AUGUST 1987 PCW 99 BENCHTEST needed to make a computer out of the 2Mbytes rather than 4Mbytes of RAM. there are rather more of them. I have four chips is to add some disk controllers The keyboard, however, was quite never been a regular Beeb user so I was and some RAM and put it all in a box. different from the production model, lost in Arthur at first; the fact that it The actual specifications of the cased in metal with only 10 function keys, shares some command names with Archimedes machines are as follows. and covered in keys with names like PCDOS (for example, DIR) which do There are two series of machines, both of HELP, MENU, LOOKS and AGAIN which different things didnt help. which live under the generic name certainly dont do what they say (some However, I soon learned to get around Archimedes. The A300 series are the dont do anything at all). Arthur and found that it has some direct replacements for the BBC Micro The hard disk in the A500 is most attractive aspects. For example, it has and Master and will bear the BBC logo. noticeable for its ferociously rapid access the Unixlike facility to define aliases for The A400 series is more upmarket, speed. It loads huge programs with a faint commands whose names you dont like. featuring internal hard disks, more burping noise, in the time it takes to blink In fact, it is very strong on configuration memory and more expansion capabilities, an eye. The reason for this speed is that altogether; stored in the CMOS RAM and will be sold under the Acorn logo ( the disk is run with no interleaving of there is a list of 30 system parameters, and maybe later Olivetti?). sectors. On an IBM XT, for example, the such as the amount of Font space and The lowest cost machine, the £799 disk rotates about six times between each number of open files, whose values can A305, comes with 512k of RAM, while the read to give the puny CPU time to digest; be inspected using STATUS and altered A310 has 1Mbyte; the A305 is Archimedes eliminates this dead time as using CONFIGURE from the keyboard. It upgradable to 1Mbyte by simply the ARM processor can suck stuff off the is also possible to assign strings to the populating vacant RAM sockets. Both disk as fast as it can rotate. function keys interactively from the models have one 3½in floppy drive, The A300 models can be expanded with keyboard using KEY, and control whose disks can be formatted to 800k or a second floppy disk drive, or with a characters may be embedded in such to 640k for Master compatibility. 20Mbyte Winchester if the backplane is strings. Any text file of commands can be All models come in the same system purchased. The podules which fit into the run as a batch file using EXEC, and such unit case, which has a metal top and slots are double Eurocards. So far Acorn files can be created without using an sides and a plastic front panel with an has announced its intention to produce editor by the BUILD command which ergonomically inclined (that is, at hand the following podules: Floating Point, a directs keystrokes into a file.