Product statement 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Acorn Risc PC 486 Card: first signs of life 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

The first sample ASICs were received from Samsung on Friday 18 November, and 
have been mounted on test cards with the Texas Instrument 486 SXL chip that 
will be used in the Acorn Risc PC 486 Card. 

All the base level hardware and software testing has been successful to 
date, and there now follows a two week period of intensive testing to verify 
the full functionality of the card and ASIC, which will include installing 
DOS and Windows and running application software. 

The first public showing of the card took place in Cambridge on Wednesday 23 
November to the Computer Society. 

The design of the card has been a joint project involving Aleph One, who 
have a successful track record in designing PC cards for Acorn 32 bit RISC 
systems, and FTDI who specialise in the design of custom ASICs for PC 
architectures. 

Acorn designed the architecture of the Risc PC specifically to support 
second processor upgrades. The Risc PC uses a technology called bus 
mastering which allows the second processor to use the memory and I/O of the 
Risc PC, thereby simultaneously keeping the cost of the upgrade down and 
delivering high performance. The Risc PC 486 Card will cost from #99 exc VAT 
and can be fitted by the user. 

The first 500 ASICs will be built into 500 evaluation cards available in 
quarter 1, 1995.   The first production cards will  be shipped to identified 
press, dealers, key educationalists and customers starting in January. Acorn 
has committed to produce 10,000 Risc PC 486 cards, and anticipates any order 
backlog will be fulfilled by the end of the first quarter 1995. 

Photographs on bulletin board 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Two photographs of the test cards have been scanned, one of which shows the 
card installed in a Risc PC.  We have made these scanned images available in 
JPEG format from our FTP site, ftp.acorn.co.uk.  Please use anonymous ftp to 
retrieve them. They can be found in the directory 
/pub/documents/products/RiscPC/jpeg.  Since they are JPEG files, you will 
need to use ChangeFSI  or similar conversion programs to decompress them and 
view them as sprites. 

TI 486 SXL specification 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

You will see from the photographs that the TI 486 SXL chip we are using is 
rated at 40 MHz, but will in fact be run on the Acorn Risc PC Card at 33 
MHz. The ASIC was designed to run at 33MHz as this gave the best range of 
486 parts, including clock doubled 66 MHz parts and other clock multiples, 
that could be supported. The TI 486 SXL part was chosen because it offered a 
range of features, including low power consumption, which made it 
particularly suitable for the Risc PC 486 Card and yet was also 
competitively priced, thereby helping Acorn to keep the price of the Risc PC 
486  Card down for its customers. 

Acorn Product Marketing, version 1.00, 24th November 1994 

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