Hi Gerry
Point taken about the dates. I expressed myself poorly. It's not the dates of the chips; it's the philosophy.
The Centroid stuff seems to be following an older philosophy and a far more expensive one too. Yes, the Acorn has seriously reduced the cost compared to their other offerings, and that is good. But it is still only 3 axes, while the main competitors are 6 axis. Well, that is what the spec page says: 3 axes only.
The lathe version does not offer threading - really? The Acorn offers a single work coordinate system (G54) rather than the full number (256?) you can get in a PC-based system. That is probably a limitation of the Beagle Bone SW in that ARM chip. You are limited to a 50kbyte g-code program in the Acorn. Coordinate system rotation is 'manual' - whatever that means. I suspect it means that G51 is not supported. The limitations go on.
GigaHertz PCs are CHEAP and well suited to doing the trajectory planning and the UI, plus handling all those more esoteric g-codes, while external FPGAs are far more suited to hammering out the pulses absolutely dead on time. The cost of (say) Mach3, an ESS, a BoB or two and several Gecko drivers is down in the hundreds of dollars. The same applies to several other brands such as UCCNC etc. This 'new' approach to CNC control supercedes the older philosophy and has brought huge price competition - which is after all one of the major reasons why Hobby CNC has boomed. We can now afford it! (Which is why Art started Mach.)
It has been said many times in the tech arena: If you don't cannibalize your own products with new ones, someone else will.
I think the Red Queen said something similar.
Cheers
Roger