2GB and 4GB

[λ the β-Redex Reducer]

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

 

[TrashyMG]

I rarely found even 2GB limiting on the OMAP5 devboard, let alone what 4GB on the Pyra will give us.

 

[mrpalmtop]

I rarely found even 2GB limiting on the OMAP5 devboard, let alone what 4GB on the Pyra will give us.

Sounds like you have some different use cases than others. There's no wrong way to use computer RAM.

 

[TrashyMG]

Sounds like you have some different use cases than others. There's no wrong way to use computer RAM.

I've done worse case browser tab loading experiments (40+ tabs), generally peg the CPU out before maxing out the 2GB of RAM. I'm sure there may be some oddball situation, but generally for regular use 4GB should plenty.

 

[Swordfish II]

There are a thousand things I can use 8GB of memory for. My desktop has 64GB and hosts multiple virtual machines and containers, runs Firefox on dozens of bloated websites (thanks Bootstrap, React, etc.). It's helpful with video editing, software compiling, and allowing for remote user sessions.

If I were doing mobile app development still, the emulators would eat RAM for breakfast.

You pointed out the big difference though. One is a highend huge desktop. One is a pocketable, battery powered handheld. That comes with certain drawbacks.

I would point out that you can ssh into your desktop via the Pyra cellular connection to do anything super highend that you need to do.

 

[matzesu]

I saw a advert on TV from Apple where they sad that you need a Mac for Contend Creation..
The Question is: Whit my 4 gb Dark Chrome Pyra i get in September, do i need then realy a Macbook to great Contend ??
Or would Video Editing work also on a 4 gb Pyra (but not that fast)..

 

[daveshah]

In theory, some video editing tasks might benefit from the hardware video encode/decode, if they pass things down to gstreamer internally. This might be some way off working, as all the code would need to be ported from old TI kernels/repos and brought up to date.

The other issue is that the hardware cannot do simultaneous encode/decode, so either one half would have to be done on the CPU or raw video would need to be buffered somewhere. The latter case is something that would probably benefit from a SATA SSD.

 

[matzesu]

My Question is halt, they used Video Audio Encoding even on the Old PCs from the 90thes, but Apple wants you believe that you need an Macbook Pro, or at best a Mac Pro (this 60.000 € Cheese Tool) ^^

I want do anything that is more advanced than design some Birthday Cards or something whit Libre Office Impress,
And maybe use the Pyra also for a bit play whit the Guitar Intervace i have, but im not a big Content Creator..

 

[RZR]

Just wondering, would 8Gb RAM not serve useful for doing CAD work, video editing etc. on the Pyra?

I don't see the point on 8Gb RAM either.

On a normal use, I don't usually need more than 3Gb RAM on my notebook on Linux, so for me 4Gb on this device is more than enough.

For CAD & video editing you'd be limited first by the CPU. In fact, most notebooks/desktops don't have enough horsepower for serious CAD/modelling or video editing, so I wouldn't expect the Pyra (thermal constraint) to be of any use there. You could try maybe 2D CAD which is quite light (but also light on RAM so...), but form factor wise it's not the best device to study/draw 2D TBH.

On my use case, the only time I topped the 8Gb RAM of my notebook's 1070 was when rendering some crazy stuff with enormous textures (then switched to hybrid rendering and end of the story...). Pyra lacks horsepower & also thermal room for this so... Also, as of today, if you are serious about CAD modelling you use a render farm.

As daveshah already wrote, the Pyra would benefit from a soc with a newer/better GPU mainly.

My Question is halt, they used Video Audio Encoding even on the Old PCs from the 90thes, but Apple wants you believe that you need an Macbook Pro, or at best a Mac Pro (this 60.000 € Cheese Tool) ^^

I want do anything that is more advanced than design some Birthday Cards or something whit Libre Office Impress,
And maybe use the Pyra also for a bit play whit the Guitar Intervace i have, but im not a big Content Creator..

And VW wants you to use their cars, as these are more efficient than the others...

On the 90s you didn't need to encode on h265 4K...

 

[matzesu]

No, VW wants you to use their car because the Volks Wagen was the Wagen fürs Volk (the Car for the Peaple), therefore they named it so.. (in the 1930tes)..
I drove 2 VWs in my Life, the Lupo of a Grand Aunt, and a T3 Mini Bus when i had to drive some Shool Children ..
My Parents got a Golf Diesel in the 80thes, but unfortunaly its Engine Blew off..

 

[theredbaron]

I have been keeping up with this thread, but getting more and more confused.

Preface: I am a "user". In no way or shape a dev, the most coding I did was a script to change my desktop background every min (of which I was quite proud of ).

My issue is, on x86 (at least with an atom cpu), 2gb is not enough for Firefox to run even just a few pages (at least when I last had 2gb a few years ago) 2 gb was fine at first, but after 20-30 min, it started thrashing my swap (which was an HD at the time), bringing the system to a near standstill for a bit. Again, haven't been on a low mem system in a long time, even my phone has 3gb.

Have browsers gotten that much better at dealing with memory/garbage cleanup, or does arm have some advantage that helps with that?

Sent from my H3123 using Tapatalk

 

[Letalis Sonus]

Again, haven't been on a low mem system in a long time, even my phone has 3gb.

T60p user here, chipset limits usable RAM to 3GiB. Ever since Firefox introduced Chrome-like multithreading the RAM usage went totally out of control, even if you limit it to just a single content thread. Without swapping to an SSD the system would be absolutely unusable with Firefox nowadays. Even on my desktop PC I run into out-of-RAM situations with Firefox from time to time, even though the system has 3x as much RAM available - it made me configure Java-based games to use the hugepages that I have reserved for my VM to avoid these kind of things.

 

[PowerGod]

Have browsers gotten that much better at dealing with memory/garbage cleanup, or does arm have some advantage that helps with that?

Lately, most of the chromium-based browsers (Vivaldi, Otter, etc...) are pretty good dealing with low memory usage

 

[TrashyMG]

I have been keeping up with this thread, but getting more and more confused.

Preface: I am a "user". In no way or shape a dev, the most coding I did was a script to change my desktop background every min (of which I was quite proud of ).

My issue is, on x86 (at least with an atom cpu), 2gb is not enough for Firefox to run even just a few pages (at least when I last had 2gb a few years ago) 2 gb was fine at first, but after 20-30 min, it started thrashing my swap (which was an HD at the time), bringing the system to a near standstill for a bit. Again, haven't been on a low mem system in a long time, even my phone has 3gb.

Have browsers gotten that much better at dealing with memory/garbage cleanup, or does arm have some advantage that helps with that?

Sent from my H3123 using Tapatalk

Now are you talking about x86 Linux or windows? because at idle on the OMAP5 devboard the last I played with it, the OS only used about 70-90MB of RAM leaving most of the 2GB for applications and such.

 

[theredbaron]

Now are you talking about x86 Linux or windows? because at idle on the OMAP5 devboard the last I played with it, the OS only used about 70-90MB of RAM leaving most of the 2GB for applications and such.

Lunux. At the time I was on an Aspire One, 1.66ghz atom with 2gb of ddr3, a sata 2 drive for swap, running Arch and LXDE. I would sit at near 200mb while idle, as I had a few programs autoboot (c*, htop, and a few other things). I use to have to use "palemoon" as my browser, because firefox just wouldn't run on 2gb, and chrome was much worse.

So firefox has gotten worse with memory since last I was on low mem. How usable is it on 4gb? Is a different browser going to be preinstalled? Would not be the first time links2 was my main browser.

Does make me glad for a 4gb model though.


Sent from my H3123 using Tapatalk

 

[TrashyMG]

I used nothing but firefox on the Omap5 devboard with only 2GB of memory and had no issues, for a while that devboard was getting heavy use for just day to day things as I had a lot of projects on my Electronics work bench and it was the easiest computer to run to. I could load up 10-15 tabs and watch a youtube video on firefox... this was a 2016-18 statement however... last couple years I've been too busy to get an updated image on my devboard.

If firefox is too heavy now a days, I mean you can literally apt install what ever light weight browser you want.

 

[FBnil]

Just because he has "Evil" in is name does not mean that he cannot be nice:

Zeus ordered Hephaestus to create Pandora as part of the punishment for humanity. Pandora had been given a pithos (box) and instructions by Zeus to keep it closed, but she had also been given the gift of curiosity, and ultimately, she opened it.
The box contained all the evils of mankind.
These evils were absorbed by a good dragon, turning him evil.

From the book of the Dragon, chapter 1:3

On the 90s you didn't need to encode on h265 4K...

Well, a PC could not really encode anything, you had to buy a special card to encode/decode in hardware (I'm a fan of Hauppauge).
My desktop CPU was 40% busy with decoding VivoActive (based on H.263)

 

[mrpalmtop]

I used nothing but firefox on the Omap5 devboard with only 2GB of memory and had no issues, for a while that devboard was getting heavy use for just day to day things as I had a lot of projects on my Electronics work bench and it was the easiest computer to run to. I could load up 10-15 tabs and watch a youtube video on firefox... this was a 2016-18 statement however... last couple years I've been too busy to get an updated image on my devboard.

If firefox is too heavy now a days, I mean you can literally apt install what ever light weight browser you want.

Firefox has gotten much worse on memory since those tests. It's a fairly recent development.

I wish this were not the case because I prefer having a browser that's non profit, open source, and supports history sync. Right now, there is no other browser that does that.

Microsoft made a massive amount of improvements to the Chromium browsers. I wish they had picked Firefox instead, but its lower performance was obviously the reason why. It was too far behind and now it's even more behind than before.

 

[levi]

I'm not sure it's so much the browser. It's how much modern shops now include reams of libraries and every other site loads too many ads. I'm blocking most of those and with 30 or so tabs currently open on this laptop with 2GB total RAM, it's using under 800MB.

Edit: Granted, I didn't expect it to be using nearly half the ram here, but I've not been keeping track of it.

 

[mrpalmtop]

I'm not sure it's so much the browser. It's how much modern shops now include reams of libraries and every other site loads too many ads. I'm blocking most of those and with 30 or so tabs currently open on this laptop with 2GB total RAM, it's using under 800MB.

Edit: Granted, I didn't expect it to be using nearly half the ram here, but I've not been keeping track of it.

Are you using the latest Firefox? My guess is that you probably are using another browser.