A Question For Craigix


delmarko

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Hi All,

Just discovered the site and very impressed by what you're all doing... might know more than i'm letting on so here is a quick question for you...

What has driven the decision to ship Pandora with only 128MB of RAM? whilst the SGX core is quite frugal with memory if you actually intend making serious use of the 3d graphics you will end up using at least 50% of that 128MB for Textures and the Parameter Buffer leaving very little left over for the App/OS.

I'm just a little bit surprised by the decision as i would've thought the difference in price between 128 and 256MB of RAM would be relatively small? Is there any intention to expand this in the future or maybe offer a different SKU with increased RAM?
 
dmdm said:
What has driven the decision to ship Pandora with only 128MB of RAM?
The OMAP 3530 is only available at this time with 128MB of RAM. All the big developers say it won't be an issue, and I tend to believe them.

Maybe I need to add it to the FAQ.
 
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Remember the SGX also supports a number of different texture compression formats :)
 
Has nobody ever seen what the psp can do with 32MB of memory, 128 is more than enough provided there is no bloated code running on the system.
 
Chip said:
dmdm said:
What has driven the decision to ship Pandora with only 128MB of RAM?
The OMAP 3530 is only available at this time with 128MB of RAM. All the big developers say it won't be an issue, and I tend to believe them.

Maybe I need to add it to the FAQ.


Indeed, the question has already been answered. Not that they'll read the faq, but at least you'll be able to direct them to it when they ask.

Simply put, other machines have done very much with much less. Yes, it will do quite well with the memory it has, and hardware wise, there is no choice in more RAM (unless you think the Pandora should wait 6-8 more months before being built and a newer SoC is made).
 
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The more memory you have, the more it costs, the more the battery costs to get the same amount of time, the longer it takes to do hibernation...

Plus, it's not a simple fact of throwing another ram chip on the board. The Pandora doesn't use ram chip in the normal sense.
 
dmdm said:
Hi All,

Just discovered the site and very impressed by what you're all doing... might know more than i'm letting on so here is a quick question for you...

What has driven the decision to ship Pandora with only 128MB of RAM? whilst the SGX core is quite frugal with memory if you actually intend making serious use of the 3d graphics you will end up using at least 50% of that 128MB for Textures and the Parameter Buffer leaving very little left over for the App/OS.

I'm just a little bit surprised by the decision as i would've thought the difference in price between 128 and 256MB of RAM would be relatively small? Is there any intention to expand this in the future or maybe offer a different SKU with increased RAM?
It is not a standard RAM module, it has built in flash memory, is in a non-standard form factor, is super low power, and costs much more.

I think that the RAM is piggy-backed onto the top of the processor package.

Craigix has stated that he does not rule out a 256mb version, once the memory becomes more widely available and demand for that much RAM makes a more expensive version viable.

Given the choice between getting it now, and paying more later for what is a LOT of RAM in a handheld, I think he has made the correct choice.

Since it is a package with the Processor, I don't know if it could be upgraded with BGA soldering equipment, or if it would be cost-effective to do so.

The upside is that most software will probably not run out of memory, and this will make the developers keep the requirements down to fit this RAM, making better programs in the future if the ram size does increase (instead of bloated apps that just throw around memory into a 256mb space).
 
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atomicthumbs said:
We need a sticky: "128MB is more than enough!"
He didn't just say "128mb is too small, I want Ubuntu with GIMP", he brought up an interesting point and actually asked 2 very good questions:

QUOTE
What has driven the decision to ship Pandora with only 128MB of RAM?


QUOTE
. . . I would've thought the difference in price between 128 and 256MB of RAM would be relatively small?


The answer being that it isn't a standard/generic RAM module and it wasn't available in larger sizes.

He brings up a good point about 3D, but I don't think it will be a problem, I much enjoy 3D on the Xbox with 64MB of RAM, so this should do just fine. Since it is only capable of "480p widescreen" native LCD resolution (and standard S-Video output) anyway I don't think we need worry about running out of memory if the games/programs take into account the memory available.
 
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hmmm very interesting, i wasn't aware TI were offering the 3530 in a stacked package-on-package format.. (quite embarassing really!) Anyway i suppose from TI's point of view especially with the target market being primarily smartphones, the 128MB specified is more than enough.

All i was hinting at is that in our testing we get through far more than 64MB of RAM (albeit that is in slightly more taxing apps than Quake 3!!! :rolleyes: )
 
cb88 said:
640k is all we will ever need!!!!
Thats just not funny anymore, and actually, it wasn't that far from the truth when it was stated all those years ago :p

You can bet in another 10 years, people will be quoting others saying "128MB is all we need!".
 
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Squidge said:
cb88 said:
640k is all we will ever need!!!!
Thats just not funny anymore, and actually, it wasn't that far from the truth when it was stated all those years ago :p

You can bet in another 10 years, people will be quoting others saying "128MB is all we need!".

but the 640K is historical :p
 
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.Gogeta§§J4BR. said:
but the 640K is historical :p
Well, yes, of course, because at the time it was a major breakthrough over the 8-bit systems that were typically limited to 64kB. Thats why its historical. It lasted a whole 6 years before people started complaining about the limitations.

The same can be said about any amount of memory.
 
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.Gogeta§§J4BR. said:
but the 640K is historical :p
And the quote's an urban myth :p

A gajabillion terabytes should cover all future requirements I reckon, with the possible exception of Windows 7...
 
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icurafu said:
Yes, SGX has the same S3TC that S3 introduced years ago. OR whatever nVidia called it after purchasing the technology. It'll be interesting to see what the creative GP32X devs can squeeze in that.
SGX530 does not support S3TC, but it supports PVRTC (4 and 2 bits per pixel) and ETC (4 bits per pixel) compressed formats.

A 512x512 texture with mipmaps needs just slightly more than 1/6 MiB when compressed to 4 bits per texel (which is ok for most textures). So you can fit ~192 of these textures into 32 MiB and leave a lot of space for other data. That seems plenty to me considering that we're talking about a handheld device with an 800x480 screen.

S3TC is still owned by S3 as far as I know. Microsoft licensed it for use with DirectX and renamed it DXTC (and now BC1-3 with DX10), but every IHV still needs a license from S3 to use it with OpenGL.
 
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