EDITORIAL

THE ARM 3

As you will have seen in last month's RISC User, Aleph One Ltd. are developing an ARM 3 upgrade board for the Arc. Acorn's ARM 3 is a development of the ARM 2 RISC chip used in all of the current Archimedes range (including the A3000 and the A400/1 series). It contains a 4K on-board memory cache, and promises very significant speed increases over the ARM 2. At the rumoured price of around £600 for the upgrade, it will be cheaper than Acorn's long-awaited floating point co-processor board (this is expected to cost around £700), and for many applications will offer a much greater speed increase. The floating point co-processor, for example will not make Basic run any faster at all. Because of the importance of the ARM 3, this month's RISC User features an article on the chip by Acorn's Roger Wilson, the author of Basic V.

RISC USER

Thanks to all who have answered last month's questionnaire. We have been very pleased with the enthusiastic response, and we will publish the results in a future issue of the magazine.

You will also see that one of the items in this month's magazine features a program which is too long to be listed in the magazine itself, but which is available on the magazine disc. While we do not intend to treat more than one program per issue in this way, nor to devote more than a page to its description, this approach does allow us to supply programs which would otherwise not see the light of day because of their length.

Finally, please note that as from early August, our new address will be:

117 Hatfield Road,
St Albans,
Herts AL1 4JS.

For full details, see the insert with this issue.

See you at the BBC Acorn User Show (July 21-23), or at our forthcoming Open Day in St Albans.

This month's telesoftware password is cranberry.