http://www.ant.co.uk/com/aleph1/lisads.html (The Risc Disc Volume 2, 10/1995)

Aleph One Risc PC 486 Cards

Aleph One is now able to offer limited quantities of advanced Risc PC 486 Cards. These cards perform substantially faster than the Acorn Risc PC 486 Card but use the same design and ASIC technology, developed for Acorn by Aleph One Ltd. and its partner Future Technology Devices International.

Faster processor

By using Cyrix DX-class 486 processors featuring advanced write-back caches, the Aleph One cards offer significantly better performance than Acorn's Risc PC 486 Card, which features a less powerful Texas Instruments 33MHz 486SX processor. The processors used in the Aleph One cards are Cyrix 486DX40 and 486DX2/66, which offer built-in DX floating point power clocked at 40MHz or 66MHz respectively.

Improved performance

The following benchmarks were generated in our test facility, and are based on the Windows User suite of benchmarks designed to test the performance of Windows PCs.

Card type         Dhrystone  Whetstone           Windows User Benchmark
                                           CPU  MEM  VID  DISK MISC OVERALL
Aleph One 486DX2/66  28955   12422.1      14.2  7.5  16.5 10.5 12.8  11.9
Aleph One 486DX40    17918    7425.6       9.6  6.5  15.5  8.2 10.2   9.6

Acorn 486SXL-33       9208     124.3       4.7  4.6   8.7  5.7  7.6   6.1

Further information and Frequently Asked Questions

Refer to the Aleph One Risc PC 486 Card FAQ for more info.

Availability

Getting the best from your Risc PC card

Windows and its applications are extremely demanding of memory. The Aleph One Risc PC 486 cards, as true coprocessor cards, share the main memory of your Risc PC. Your Risc PC will run fastest if it has 1MB or 2MB of VRAM fitted. Even with 8MB of DRAM memory fitted to your Risc PC, you may find that you need additional memory to run all the programs you want. Aleph One can supply suitable SIMMs for your Risc PC - consult the current price list for details.

Future developments

Aleph One continues to work to bring the best of the PC world to the Acorn platform. Future improvements to the PC card for Risc PC are expected but will not become available until the fourth quarter of 1995 at the earliest. A redesigned ASIC will enable us to fit faster processors to cards. Faster processors cannot be fitted to the current Aleph One Risc PC 486 Cards.

This information concerns a product under continuous development. Aleph One reserves the right to alter its specification without notice. E&OE. HTML Edition - ARvS - İAleph One Ltd. April 1995.