the CP486, based on the Intel 80486 running SCO Unix or Xenix and offering support for the Weitek 4167 floating point unit and Intel i860 "application accelerator". This machine was available in 1989 and described as the basis of a "high-cost authoring workstation" in a European initiative, but was rather more expensive than Acorn's RISC iX workstations, costing $16,250 for a configuration with 4 MB of RAM and 150 MB hard disk. Crude hardware performance comparisons based on Dhrystone benchmarking under like-for-like environments - taking results from CP486 benchmarks run under DOS and from Archimedes benchmarks run under RISC OS - indicate that the CP486 (rated at 25456 Dhrystones per second) was several times faster than the R140 (similar ARM2-based machines producing a rating of approximately 6000) and was still considerably faster than the R260 (rated at 22425). Floating-point arithmetic performance of the CP486 was approximately double that of the R260 with FPA fitted (5847 KWhetstones per second for the former versus 2788 for the latter). Of more relevance to RISC iX itself, in the context of the workstations developed for European initiatives, the Chorus system was to be used as the basis of the Unix operating system provided, this having been ported to the ARM3. In computational performance terms, Acorn's R140 compared unfavourably with other 1989 models such as the Sun SPARCstation 1 and Digital DECstation 3100, particularly with regard to floating-point performance, although such disadvantages could perhaps have been somewhat overlooked in an entry-level workstation costing around or approximately $, compared to for the DECstation 3100, or for the entry-level DECstation 2100. The R260 compared more favourably in terms of integer performance with its contemporaries employing processors such as the Intel 486 and Motorola 68030, but comparing less favourably with 68040-based models and newer models from traditional RISC workstation vendors. At the point of the introduction of floating-point hardware for the R260 in 1993, the performance of the R260 was decidedly uncompetitive with the final MIPS-based DECstation models and contemporary SPARCstation models. In 1994, the Risc PC launched with an improved chipset that was amenable to running Unix, and amidst a certain level of interest in the "large potential" of Unix running on the new machine, the independent RiscBSD initiative was announced in August 1994 to bring "a base of BSD4.4 - probably the NetBSD flavour" to this hardware platform. A "very, very alpha kernel" was demonstrated after