patrick@sideways.gen.nz (Pat Cain) (06/18/91)
Here is a review of the A540, reproduced from yesterday's Dominion newspaper Info Technology section (without permission)... Page 10, IT Section, The Dominion, Monday June 17 1991. ACORN'S ARCHIMEDES 540 PACKS A POWERFUL PUNCH Nobilangelo Ceramalus puts Acorn's hot box, the Archimedes 540, through its paces. ACORN's powerful new flagship, the Archimedes 540, has taken on much greater significance since the formation last December of ARM (advanced reduced instruction set computing machine), a British-based joint venture involving Acorn, Apple and VLSI Technology. The A600 chip the venture will launch this year is backward compatible with the ARM3 (Acorn risc machine) that powers the A540, which can thus be seen as a pointer to future Apples. Though Acorn is no computer giant, its early start in risc has made it one of the world's top three manufacturers: its user base of 120,000 units ranks behind Hewlett-Packard/Apollo's 160,000 and Sun's 450,000. The Archimedes was launched in late 1987 on the 8-megahertz ARM2 chip, which achieves 4.5 million instructions a second. The 26MHz ARM3 in the A540 is quoted at 13.5 mips, but the actual performance, as with all caching chips, depends on the application. It outperforms 25MHz 80486 machines, and british benchmarks showed it running between three and 15 times faster than the earlier Archimedes. The Archimedes straddles the blurred line between personal computers and technical workstations. Acorn calls it a personal workstation. The A540 is a stunning machine: lightning fast and extremely powerful. Its Risc OS windows enviroment is intuitive, well designed and extraordinarily flexible - a joy to use. The review machine was a standard Archimedes 540 with 4 megabytes of Ram (upgradable to 16Mb), an internal 120Mb SCSI hard disc (the controller uses one of four expansion slots) and an 800Kb 3.25-inch floppy. DESIGN Externally, the A540 varies little from the A400s: the f-key cardholder has gone; the facia of the floppy disc has been rearranged; and the three-button mouse is now a Logitech. Coincidentally, the only discoverable negatives arose from two of those differences. The release button for floppy discs is too high and too far left and discs tend to hit your hand as they eject; and omitting the f-key strip holder was retrogressive -- it should have been optional. The keyboard, which has an excellent touch, has the standard IBM-style 103-key layout, but Acorn sensibly puts the signal LEDs for Caps Lock, Scroll Lock and Num Lock on the keys themselves instead of away in a corner. The facia is tilted upward 15 degrees, a considerable piece of ergonomics because it makes floppies much easier to use. THe footprint is small (370 x 400 millimetres); the profile is low -- only 102mm -- so you are not looking up at the screen; your head can maintain its natural slightly downward inclination. The design is simple, striking and pleasant. # Rating: VERY GOOD. SETTING UP It took 17 minutes to unpack and connect everything, read te first pages of the Installation Guide, and power on. No problems were encountered, nor were there any during the next two weeks. Setting up an Archimedes can be as simple as using the default configuration or as complex as you want. The possibilities are unlimited. # Rating: EXCELLENT. FEATURES The most outstanding feature of the A540 is the combined power of the ARM3 and the risc OS operating system. Risc OS is also the main reason why Archimedes applications cost so little; sophisticated routines need surprisingly small amounts of code -- for example, a filing system in 200 lines. Risc OS is multitasking (up to 32), extraordinarly configurable, and supports multiple filing systems. Bundled are Advanced Disc Filing System, for non-SCSI drives, SCSIFS, RAMFS and NetFS (for Acorn's Econet). DOSFS and Sun NFS are also available. Risc OS is in Rom, which means not only that maximum Ram is available for applications, but also that bad programmers (in both senses), cannot corrupt it. Scalable outline-font capability is an integral part of Risc OS --- built on Bezier curves, the same primitives used by Postscript. Anti-aliasing can be invoked for high-quality displays. There are hundreds of soft fonts, all endlessly alterable. Twenty-five pieces of software are bundled with the A540, including Edit, Draw (a powerful Bezier-based program), Paint, a good Alarm/Diary, and floating-point. Printer-drivers include PostScript, Epson, and Hewlett Packard. Soft font 600dpi laser printing is available for $1500. Software, both retail and public domain, covers a wide range (some excellent packages are exported from New Zealand). Retail prices are generally modest. For example, adding Ms-Dos is $180 (plus GST); 1st Word Plus $110 (it features a real-time spelling-checker); DTP packages $115 to $559; 3D modelling $230 plus; and spreadsheets are $450-$600. Public-domain software converts from/to Archimedes and TIF, GIF, PC Paint, Sun, MacPaint, Atari and AmigaIFF. The back panel has connectors for high-res monochrome (up to 1152 x 896 pixels), analogue RGB colour (up to 800 x 600); parallel, serial and SCSI devices; peripheral power; headphones; and an optional network. # Rating: EXCELLENT. PERFORMANCE In a word: fast. Very fast. The A540 ran the wide range of review software between two and seven times faster than the older ARM2-powered A440 (tasks chosen were procesor intensive to eliminate or minimise the effect of the A540's faster disc). For example, the A540 took only five seconds to redraw a complex 1700-vector 2D drawing; an A440 took 11 seconds. Loading an entire 100,000 word (600Kb) WP file took a mere six seconds, the word count took one second, searching for a word at the end took nine seconds and saving took nine seconds; an A440 took 17, six, 30 and 21 seconds. Application differences precluded full comparisons, but the top-end Macintosh, the multitasking, 8-mips IIfx, took 33 seconds to count the words and 26 seconsd to save; a single-tasking Compaq 386/25 took 23 seconds to save. Powering on and booting took 16 seconds, a warm-boot two seconds. Warm-booting into a sophisticated, 30-task configuration file took 15 seconds. Tests by a computer science honours graduate from Canterbury University gave the A540 22 mips and 16.7 specmarks (integer). Its Dhrystone rating is 19,752/sec -- well inside workstation, even minicomputer, class. A Sun 4/260 Sparc workstation does 16,340/sec; a Sparc workstation 1 does 19,182/sec; an HP9000/835 does 22,727/sec (an IBM RS/6000 does 60,000 plus/sec). A Mac IIfx does 10,490/sec. # Rating: EXCELLENT. EASE OF USE The Archimedes ignores debates over graphical user interfaces and charcter interfaces. You can use either or both. The graphical interface is as friendly and transparent as you could wish. The look and feel of the system have been extremely well thought out the result is superb. Most applications follow Acorn's "RiscWare" standard. # Rating: EXCELLENT. DOCUMENTATION Four manuals are supplied: Installation Guide (112pp), Risc OS User's Guide (470pp), BBC Basic Guide (440pp) for programming, and the SCSI User's Guide (85pp). The best of these -- the first two, which people will use most often -- are excellent. But a few unfriendly spotsm such as in the command that configures window dragging, lower the score. # Rating: VERY GOOD. SUPPORT The A540 comes with a 12-month guarantee, which covers parts and labour but not the cost of sending the machine to Acorn NZ. Acorn supports its own software and any third-party software it handles. There are four support staff. Queries during test calls were quickly answered. # Rating: GOOD. VALUE The A540 is $8795 (plus GST and monitor; 4 Mb upgrades $1495). That works out about $500 per mips, excellent value for money -- even more so considering that you get risc now rather than the fag-end of cisc. The A540 outstrips all other PCs in its price range and beats most in any range. Applications cover most things several times over, and are usually far less costly than their IBM/compatible and Apple equivalents. # Rating: EXCELLENT. RATINGS AT A GLANCE ####################### The A540 is the top-end model in Acorn's Archimedes range. Lightning fast and extremely powerful, it is a joy to work with and a superb machine for those who want easy-to-use reduced instruction set computing at a low cost. Price: NZ$8795 (plus GST). Distributor: Acorn NZ, 1 Ngaire Avenue, Epsom, Auckland. 09 520-4049. # DESIGN: Very Good # SETTING UP: Excellent # FEATURES: Excellent # PERFORMANCE: Excellent # EASE OF USE: Excellent # DOCUMENTATION: Very Good # SUPPORT: Good # VALUE: Excellent ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nobilangelo Ceramalus is freelance journalist and industry commentator. -- Pat Cain, PO Box 2060, Wellington, New Zealand. (patrick@sideways.welly.gen.nz)