Another Retro Computer returns from the ashes

[Hattig]

Yay co-operative multi-tasking!

Still, they were nice machines back in the day. And this is a pretty cheap option.

[Hattig]

The ARM Cortex A9 can get 2.5 DMIPS/MHz, so a dual 1GHz board can get 5000 DMIPS. It's an out-of-order core as well. It should compete quite well on a per clock basis with a G4, and then you have to consider that there are two cores as well.

Shame that Hyperion probably won't port AmigaOS 4.1 to ARM though. Advances ARM SoCs would bring the cost of entry down massively.

[Hattig]

The X86 PC is the ultimate retro computer i.e. still running 1970s CISC** ISA and ancient BIOS.
**Translated to internal RISCy ISA.

64-bit x86 is far more amenable though. You could think of the instruction encoding as being crufty with the prefix bytes, but otherwise it's mostly orthogonal, 16 registers, etc.

[Hattig]

How about a 2Ghz ARM processor based Soc?
NuSmart 2816 40nm Soc by Chinese company Beijing Nufront.
Of course its not available yet, but it is supposedly going to be introduced in 2011.
Scary! Could the future of processors be found in China, not California?

Every standard ARM core is designed in Cambridge, England.

Marvell have an ISA license, so their cores are custom (evolution of the StrongARM -> XScale lineage) but are binary compatible. Qualcomm similarly have an ISA license. They produce Snapdragon cores as used in many phones.

Other cores use the off-the-shelf core designs that ARM produces, from hard macros to cores expressed in HDL.

The success of ARM is because of the myriad of different designs available based around the ISA or licenced core designs.