Acorn News: Latest Arrival Packs a Punch
Kevin Coleman
for more info. Alan. ]
Acorn's Latest Arrival Packs a Punch
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Cambridge, England, 2nd April 1996.
Acorn Risc Technologies (ART) is pleased to announce that at
11:12 on Tuesday 26th March 1996, the first prototype Risc
PC StrongARM Processor Card was powered up.
ART is a division of Acorn Computer Group, leading
developers and suppliers of innovative technology products
and services.
This experimental card, using a first release of Advanced
Risc Machine Ltd's StrongARM processor, managed to achieve
an internal clock speed of 228MHz and produced a first
benchmark of 147,000 Dhrystones.
Following testing and modification to the system software
ART's engineers have managed to increase the performance to
circa 290,000 Dhrystones. These figures should improve
again upon receipt of production silicon from Digital
Equipment Corporation.
The StrongARM card is running Acorn's RISC OS and supporting
a number of applications such as a graphics rendering
package and JPEG decompresser. ART is delighted to announce
this first significant milestone and as a result of this
confirm that it will be producing a cacheless StrongARM
daughter upgrade card for the award-winning Risc PC for sale
during Quarter 3 1996.
The StrongARM device has major implications for the key
technologies that ART is developing and considerable
performance improvements are possible in the areas of
videophone, mobile communications devices and display
terminals.
Using a conversion factor between kilo-Dhrystones and
Dhrystone MIPs of 1.75 the following performance is given:
Test machine specification
==========================
Risc PC, VRAM fitted, Dhrystone 2.1 in single-tasking shell window
Benchmarks
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Processor Core clock Dhrystones Dhrystone MIPs Comparison
ARM 710 40 MHz 52,000 30 1
StrongARM 228 MHz 290,000 166 5.6
Background
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Acorn Computer Group supplies innovative technologies and
consultancy through its complementary divisions.
Acorn focuses on the generation and renewal of intellectual
property. Its designs and licences enable partners to bring
new products to market faster and improve profitability.
The Acorn Computer Group includes: Acorn Online Media,
Acorn Network Computers and Acorn Risc Technologies. Acorn
also has a 43 percent share holding in Advanced RISC
Machines (Holdings) Limited and has fifty percent ownership
of Xemplar Education Ltd,a new joint venture company
combining both Acorn and Apple's education businesses, which
has been created to be the leading solutions provider to UK
education.
______________________________________________________________________
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