Well its been an absolute age since I posted anything on here so here goes.
I have an early Acorn A3010 with a Mezzanine CPU board which has the support chips and CPU on it rather than the more well known "System on a chip" Arm 250 all in one's that were the 'norm' on these machines.
PaulV AKA Paul Vernon, very kindly did some work on it for me, including, an off board battery that I could change easily, install a 25 Mhz Arm 3 upgrade and and fettle it for me so that the hard drive micropodule I had worked with all the upgrades installed. He documented the process on his website:
http://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Acorn-A3010/
More specifically my machine:
Arm 3 upgrade: http://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Upgrading-an-Acorn-A3010-with-an-ARM3-processor/
Chopping up my IDE board to make it fit (and work afterwards
) : http://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Adding-an-IDE-podule-to-an-ARM3-upgraded-A3010/
There are benchmarks on those pages too. For some or perhaps most of you this wont be news, I may be wrong but I suspect he posted on here already about this. I'm including it for reference.
My own fiddling has led me to acquire a FPU chip for it (very rare) and overclock some ( I now have the machine running at 30 Mhz
)
Yes I know I have been lazy with the pictures but here's a fave:
Benchmarking shows around 16-17 Mips, this was peak and I would take it with a pinch of salt but I'm pleased. Next step is some faster (50 ns) RAM and upclock that a bit.
I should say that standard this machine has everything running at 12Mhz which puts it at around 7 Mips. Not a bad increase, and there's a weebit more to come.
With the faster Ram I'm sure it will be over 20 mips. As it is this is knocking on the door of RISC PC 600 (30mhz) performance.... and with the quicker ram should be near RPC700 (40Mhz, 22 MIPS)
I'm sure the CPU will do more than 30Mhz but I don't want to push it much further as the FPA10 Floating point chips, are notorious for not liking overclock. It works at 30MHz, I don't want to fry it, given how rare they are (and expensive when they do come up.)oh:
Should also say that my machine is Running Charlie's Classic Risc OS pretty well. Now that I've ironed out some 'features'.....
Waiting on:
Passive heatsinks for CPU FPU and ram chips.
Faster 50ns Ram chips
Sockets to fit them.
Need to get some crystals to test how far I can push.
Will probably rewrite/add to this as time goes on but thought I'd make a start. I have more pics I will populate with once I dig them out/take new ones. Paul sent me a ton.
cheers
Andrew
I have an early Acorn A3010 with a Mezzanine CPU board which has the support chips and CPU on it rather than the more well known "System on a chip" Arm 250 all in one's that were the 'norm' on these machines.
PaulV AKA Paul Vernon, very kindly did some work on it for me, including, an off board battery that I could change easily, install a 25 Mhz Arm 3 upgrade and and fettle it for me so that the hard drive micropodule I had worked with all the upgrades installed. He documented the process on his website:
http://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Acorn-A3010/
More specifically my machine:
Arm 3 upgrade: http://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Upgrading-an-Acorn-A3010-with-an-ARM3-processor/
Chopping up my IDE board to make it fit (and work afterwards
) : http://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Adding-an-IDE-podule-to-an-ARM3-upgraded-A3010/There are benchmarks on those pages too. For some or perhaps most of you this wont be news, I may be wrong but I suspect he posted on here already about this. I'm including it for reference.
My own fiddling has led me to acquire a FPU chip for it (very rare) and overclock some ( I now have the machine running at 30 Mhz
)Yes I know I have been lazy with the pictures but here's a fave:
Benchmarking shows around 16-17 Mips, this was peak and I would take it with a pinch of salt but I'm pleased. Next step is some faster (50 ns) RAM and upclock that a bit.
I should say that standard this machine has everything running at 12Mhz which puts it at around 7 Mips. Not a bad increase, and there's a weebit more to come.
With the faster Ram I'm sure it will be over 20 mips. As it is this is knocking on the door of RISC PC 600 (30mhz) performance.... and with the quicker ram should be near RPC700 (40Mhz, 22 MIPS)
I'm sure the CPU will do more than 30Mhz but I don't want to push it much further as the FPA10 Floating point chips, are notorious for not liking overclock. It works at 30MHz, I don't want to fry it, given how rare they are (and expensive when they do come up.)
oh:Should also say that my machine is Running Charlie's Classic Risc OS pretty well. Now that I've ironed out some 'features'.....
Waiting on:
Passive heatsinks for CPU FPU and ram chips.
Faster 50ns Ram chips
Sockets to fit them.
Need to get some crystals to test how far I can push.
Will probably rewrite/add to this as time goes on but thought I'd make a start. I have more pics I will populate with once I dig them out/take new ones. Paul sent me a ton.
cheers
Andrew
