Castle announces today the immediate availability of the UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) hard drive upgrade for its IYONIX pc users. Considerable work has been undertaken to implement UDMA support within the standard ADFS structure of RISC OS 5. Following intensive testing all IYONIX pcs shipped from today will feature UDMA performance.
With UDMA support, hard drive performance is boosted significantly with theoretical read speeds of up to 100MB per second. All functions which involve hard disc activity are now virtually instantaneous, All aspects of the IYONIX pc will benefit from a noticeable increase in performance, from initial booting of the computer, to using a wide range of desktop applications, to using the 'C' language compiler, and even when shutting down.
Depending on the hard drive installed, current in-use speeds of up to 45MB/sec can be achieved (speed limited currently by hard drive technology). This is over 22 times faster than a standard Risc PC. So a massive 80MB sprite file will take just under 2 seconds to load into Paint.
All existing IYONIX pc users will be sent a simple in-field UDMA upgrade pack over the next few weeks. This will be a free-of-charge upgrade.
Castle's all-new 32-bit IYONIX pc - THE WORLD'S FIRST XSCALE DESKTOP COMPUTER - will be running UDMA at the Wakefield RISC OS show on the 10th May 2003. A range of high specification IYONIX pcs will be on sale at this event.
For more information on the 32-bit IYONIX pc visit www.iyonix.com.
Issued by Mike Williams on behalf of Castle Technology Ltd