Drobe Launchpad | Iyonix on sale now: First batch at Midlands show

Iyonix on sale now: First batch at Midlands show

Published on 28th Nov 2002, 22:11:08, source is drobe.co.uk
By Chris Williams

And the price is... revealed

The wait is over. The press release is out. The Iyonix is here and with a price. A price indeed! And all a day after the Omega is reportedly in production, fancy that? The official eye watering specifications are as follows:

Totally new motherboard design
80321 XScale 32-bit ARM processor. This processor runs at 600MHz and is a system-on-a-chip, containing all the necessary interface electronics for things like PCI under the hood.
RISC OS 5 in FlashROM (Rewritten for 32 bit, equivalent to RISC OS 4.02 with added fun including updated font manager with unicode support and new icon set too)
128MB 64-bit DDR RAM for high speed access at 200MHz
UDMA 80GB Hard Drive
Support for industry standard interfaces:
- 2 64-bit PCI slots, 2 32-bit PCI slots
- 4 USB 1.1 sockets
- 2 RS232 serial ports
- 10/10/1000baseT networking port
Dedicated high performance graphics card, nVidia GeForce2 MX400 (up to 2048x1536 in 16 million colours)
CD quality 16-bit Soundblaster support
CD-ReWriter (48x speed)
240 Watt PSU with two near-silent fans
Wide range of bundled 32-bit software: Writer+ (word processor with enhanced Word import and export), Fireworkz (spreadsheet with Excel import and export), Oregano 2 (web browser), Messenger Lite (email client), PDF (for reading PDF files), Zool (game), CDBurn (CD writer). Also, USB printing support.

All for Ł1299 inc. VAT. Yes, there's your price, valid until the 31st December 2002 as a special launch price. The first 50 machines will be on sale at the Midlands RISC OS Show this Saturday. You'll probably want to be there. Castle are taking orders for the machine (finally), see the Iyonix website for ordering details.

Clues
We realised launch was imminent when Iyonix flyers started appearing through drobe.co.uk readers' letter boxes.

It's touching how the 500th drobe.co.uk article is the announcement of a 600Mhz 32bit RISC OS machine. The Iyonix has promised everything the user has been crying for: XScale processor, USB, PCI, nVidia calibre graphics system and faster networking. The next few days are going to be very busy.

Links
Iyonix website (updated)
Full Iyonix launch press release from Castle
Iyonix compatibility database
Resources for developers concerning the Iyonix

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