In the closing years of Acorn, they showed a prototype of a board with
five StrongArm processors. At the time, most of us weren't quite sure
what to do with that, but it sure looked impressive! Sadly it never
really materialised, but now its successor is here....

Spurred on by one customer's seemingly simple demand - "I'll buy if I can
run RISC OS and Linux at the same time", we present the Hydra, capable of
not just running two operating systems at once, but SIX of them!

The Hydra is our first truly expandable computer system - you can
literally add more heads to add functionality. Each head is a Compute
Module - a small board containing the brains of a Raspberry Pi, possibly
with eMMC storage and/or wifi, and backed up by its own high-speed NVME
SSD slot for hundreds of MB/s data IO. Each head can talk to the others,
and you can add heads as you see fit.

Why not start with RISC OS and Linux heads, and maybe add a wifi-router
head, a firewall/SSL appliance head, or a 26bit RISC OS head, or a head to
run Windows apps....

Sounds amazing, right? That's up to 24 cores of ARM goodness, with (potentially) 40+ TB of storage, all in a tiny ITX case! Well, it is
real, and it is here. You can access heads from your RISC OS desktop,
share files and data between heads, and... well, the sky's the limit
really.

Of course, this isn't as affordable as some of the other, but it is still cheaper than the Iyonix was at launch, and that's before taking inflation
into account.

With multiple gigabit ethernet interfaces, up to 4k HDMI graphics,
multiple USB ports (front and rear) and all the usual trimmings, Hydra
might just be the RiscPC successor we've always imagined...


A home user might choose to have just a pair of heads - one Linux, one
RISC OS. Like our other machines, Hydra allows RISC OS users to shun SD
cards, and utilise eMMC and high speed NVME SSDs.

If you've bemoaned the lack of Wifi on RISC OS, why not share wifi access
from one of the heads, allowing every machine (including RISC OS) to
utilise wifi?

Want to run Windows apps? A Twister OS head comes pre-built to allow the
use of Windows applications and even (some) games and may be a better
choice than traditional Pi OS.

The key here is flexibility - we'll work with you to design a Hydra of
your dreams - not your nightmares!


Business users can mix and match heads to meet their needs - server heads, firewalls/SSL, RISC OS client heads for Prophet etc - again, Hydras can
grow to fill your requirements, and develop to meet your changing needs.


You'll be able to testdrive the Hydra on our stand at the
Wakefield-in-Bradford show.

Best wishes,

Andrew

--
R-Comp
22 Robert Moffat, High Legh, Knutsford, Cheshire WA16 6PS
Tel: 01925 755043 Fax: 01925 757377 http://www.rcomp.co.uk

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