Iyonix mobo spotted in the wild | Drobe.co.uk archives

Iyonix mobo spotted in the wild

By Chris Williams. Published: 2nd Jun 2004, 16:42:42 | Permalink | Printable

Tungsten ARM dev kit

When Castle purchased the RISC OS technology from Pace and later merged with Tematic, there was much talk of employing RISC OS in embedded and multimedia systems and in ARM powered development products. Now call us cynical, but we just couldn't find any instance of the Castle Iyonix or RISC OS being used in this way outside of our niche market, until today.

ADI Engineering are currently retailing the "80321 Tungsten board", as designed by Tematic, with 'tungsten' being the Iyonix codename. This is no coincidence naturally, because it is essentially the Iyonix motherboard, and features the usual 80321 XScale processor plus up to 8MB of Flash memory where upon RISC OS resides, although Debian Linux is installed on the hard disc. Yours for 2395USD.

ADI also sell other XScale powered system boards, and we earlier found one Korean website that also re-sells the Tungsten board, which is billed as including "all the 80321 XScale hardware and Linux software components necessary to support a full ARM development platform".

Links

Tungsten board

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Discussion

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Interesting how they sell the board alone for more or less the price of an Iyonix.

The Doctor on 2/6/04 6:11PM
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TheDoctor: Maybe MicroDigital could buy some, port RISC OS to it, call it a "soft computer", and sell the end result for far more than the Iyonix?

Of course, they won't need to do that, since they'll be shipping ARMtwister(tm) systems by August 2004. Right? :-)

It looks like an Iyonix motherboard, it smells like an Iyonix motherboard, you can buy it without RISC OS or support for RISC OS for almost the same price as a complete Iyonix plus peripherals.

Maybe Castle's shareholders will demand that Castle ask 2500ukp for complete Iyonix systems in future, now that this has got out.

Oddly enough, I set up a SUNW Opteron system with Red Hat Linux installed, this week. Won't last long though...

dgs

dgs on 2/6/04 8:41PM
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Nice to see new areas with RISC OS in use.

Revin Kevin on 2/6/04 9:06PM
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Well, I think that covers all eventualities

:TheDoctor:

The Doctor on 2/6/04 9:09PM
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groovy

is this the magic 50000 project?

;-)

epistaxsis@work on 2/6/04 9:24PM
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Hoho. You think ADI will sell 50000 devkits? :-D

imj on 2/6/04 9:40PM
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imj: I'm sure they'll ask you for market research background, if they do.

Just like John Kortink, you seem to be an expert!

dgs

dgs on 2/6/04 10:27PM
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So what kind of people are buying this kind of mobos? Is it a (potentially) big market?

jjvdgeer on 2/6/04 10:32PM
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It is a different market to the normal RISC OS end market.

Let's hope the manufactures get lots of different markets.

p.s Well doen Drobe for finding the info in the first place.

Revin Kevin on 2/6/04 10:37PM
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50,000 units *is* quite a lot for a development board, actually. Many more than most companies could ever hope to sell, at least of a single model. If they could, they wouldn't be so damned expensive. What bulks did Castle make Iyonix boards in originally? Very small, I imagine, partially explaining the high price. Let's hope if the 50,000 unit thing does happen, the benefits will trickle through to the normal RISC OS people in the form of much cheaper machines.

nunfetishist on 2/6/04 11:06PM
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Grek1 on 2/6/04 11:14PM
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dgs: " It looks like an Iyonix motherboard, it smells like an Iyonix motherboard, you can buy it without RISC OS or support for RISC OS for almost the same price as a complete Iyonix plus peripherals"

AFAIK, ADI sells it with RISC OS in flash AND linux on hard disc/6 CDROM distro: " Software • RISC OS operating system (in Flash) • Debian Linux operating system (on hard drive) • RISC OS C/C++ development suite • Linux distribution set (6 CDs)"

Sorry for the lame quoting, but I still don't understand quoting in Drobe.

bernie on 2/6/04 11:22PM
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Did Castle not tell us the who (ADI Engineering??) the 50,000 were? Or is Korea the resource supplier of our Iyonixs. :laugh: Thanks to Castle for the fact that we have got lucky cheap Iyonix? ;-)

Not too long ago wasn't it ROMs found in the Middle East, now "80321 Tungstenboards" in Korea - Wow, RISC OS really is world wide! I think it's just pleasing to hear that bits and pieces of our platform is readily and still available :grin: Cheers, Steve.

Sawadee on 2/6/04 11:41PM
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bernie: So how does their support for RISC OS users work?

dgs

dgs on 3/6/04 1:15AM
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AFAIK (and as stated in their site) they don't give/sell support for RO. My post was intended to reply to first part of statement, i.e. ADI sells mobo with RO (and C/C++ suite!!).

bernie on 3/6/04 10:12AM
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At the last ROUGOL meeting Castle (Jack) said that the big order was "at least 50000", and could go up to 250000. However he also said it was NOT using Iyonix motherboards, so don't get your hopes up for them suddenly becoming cheap :-(

helpful on 3/6/04 3:13PM
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Iyonix motherboards or not, still great to see Castle do well in business even if it is't Iyonix/RISCOS related. Besides, isn't our market still too small for Castle to depend on us? At the end of the day, surely we are to benefit something good from any of Castles success? ;-)

Sawadee on 4/6/04 1:01AM
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nice. so by how much did the iyonix miss out on 64bit pciX? can development of hardware support for the adi board filter back to risc os driver development? perhaps a risc os powered server class machine might be an option if true arm technology powered laptops remain a dream :o)

lostamarble on 4/6/04 8:43AM
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lostamarble:

PCI-x "extensions" are part of the Xscale I think - our chip is a lot more than just a CPU! :-)

There is much on the motherboard that is, as yet, not implemented on RISC OS.

MIDI, SPDIF and IrDA for starters :-D

epistaxsis@work on 4/6/04 5:43PM
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