Actual specs?

[levi]

15% of 12 hours is 1 hour 48 mins : 12 hours -> 10 hours 12 mins
15% of 8 hours is 1 hour 12 mins : 8 hours -> 6 hours 48 mins

Perhaps you have a specific runtime requirement, say you're developing the kernel and can't put it into suspend mode, and are away from a charger for 7 hours at a stretch, the latter could be worse than the former.  But for most of us, the proportionality of a percentage works perfectly - we'll need to put it on charge 15% more times a month.

For the record, I'm not personally in favour of discharging the battery fifteen more times out of every hundred, if it's not required for the vast, vast majority of use cases.  I'm just saying that the maths works for me whatever the full charge runtime at 2GB is.

 

[rygD]

15% of 12 hours is 1 hour 48 mins : 12 hours -> 10 hours 12 mins
15% of 8 hours is 1 hour 12 mins : 8 hours -> 6 hours 48 mins

Exactly.

Perhaps you have a specific runtime requirement, say you're developing the kernel and can't put it into suspend mode, and are away from a charger for 7 hours at a stretch, the latter could be worse than the former.  But for most of us, the proportionality of a percentage works perfectly - we'll need to put it on charge 15% more times a month.

For the record, I'm not personally in favour of discharging the battery fifteen more times out of every hundred, if it's not required for the vast, vast majority of use cases.  I'm just saying that the maths works for me whatever the full charge runtime at 2GB is.

I was thinking more along the lines of being reachable during the workday.  If  charging it once a day, as I would if I am using it for calls and texts, it would be once a day either way.  I suppose for some people that charge it more or less frequently than that it might be a problem, somehow.  None of it matters, we know what we are probably getting, and that is unlikely to change.  Maybe if we ask for less RAM we can prevent people from needing to charge as frequently.

 

[DrHAX]

the 1ghz Pandora has 512mb of ram.... 2gbs sounds INCREDIBLE to me.

4 or 8gbs sounds a bit to much.If the dev board results are anything to prove.( Not unless we're dealing with x86 future boards then I could see 4gbs or 8gbs due to the way x86 seems to be.)

But even then... 2gb's will be fine ESPECIALLY after the systems are optimized.

Seriously you guysm this is starting to remind me of the HP pissing contests at the local car shows.. It doesn't matter if you have 750hp on a small block chevy thats been bored out... your gas mileage will limit how far you can go and at 6 mpg you ain't gonna get far on a tank of gas.

The Pyra isn't going to be running crysis or sc2. 2gb's seems more then reasonable considering what people are able to do on the pandora. If theres a true desire for 4gb's after the 2gb's are released (Remember the CC unit only had 256mb... the rebirth had the same processor with 512mb.... and the 1ghz had 512mb as i've stated earlier.)  then ED will supply us, but I truly doubt that 2gbs will be a limiting factor. 

 

[Luke-Jr]

Memory can be turned off when not in use, so battery life shouldn't be affected much... going to 8 GB just means you'd need to power 2 GB if you were using <2 GB (assuming 4 chips) instead of powering 512 MB for <512 MB. Unless I'm missing something...

2 GB isn't very much. I plan to mainly use mine as a VNC client, so I can probably get by, but if someone wanted to use the Pyra as a serious desktop/laptop replacement, it simply needs more.

 

[TrashyMG]

2 GB isn't very much. I plan to mainly use mine as a VNC client, so I can probably get by, but if someone wanted to use the Pyra as a serious desktop/laptop replacement, it simply needs more.

What are your plans with it other than VNC seriously? I can have several games running, Libreoffice, IRC client  and a browser with 12+ tabs open on real web pages and not use even 1GB of RAM on the Devboard. If anything the Processing power needs of all the programs running will be a bigger concern before you become worried about using up the 2GB of RAM.

 

[levi]

Memory can be turned off when not in use, so battery life shouldn't be affected much... going to 8 GB just means you'd need to power 2 GB if you were using <2 GB (assuming 4 chips) instead of powering 512 MB for <512 MB. Unless I'm missing something...

Additionally to what Trashy just said, I think you're missing why RAM chips use current all the time - because of current leakage inside every transistor in the chip.  The only way to stop them consuming a little leakage current is to stop supplying them with voltage.

Theoretically that's probably not too hard - you could probably just use a transistor or two to control the +V rail to each chip.  But you'd need to code something pretty low level in the kernel to manage turning them on and off, and then code it again for alt-OSes like RISC OS.  And I'm not sure if the OMAP chip even supports hot swapping like that.  It sounds like a lot of trouble to me, in short.

 

[JDTAY]

Two gigs of ram sounds fine to me, but I'm kind of a newb. *shrug*

 

[Binky]

I was using a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 with 2GB of RAM until three years ago.
It coped with everything I could throw at it (including KDE, FF, etc) until I wanted to edit 20-layer, 20Mpx RGBA images with the GIMP.

Since I don't fancy doing heavy graphics editing on a device with a 5" screen, 2GB seems like plenty. That said, I wouldn't say no to 4GB unless there are some convincing power-consumption measurements to look at.
 

 

[Neelix]

I rather suspect what we end up with in terms of RAM is going to be purely a matter of whats most economical.  Don't forget that the number and pinout of the of RAM chips is now set,  as changing that now would require an extensive redesign of the CPU daughterboard.  So I suspect it will come down to what RAM is available in the right form factor and at what prices and which solution offers the best value for money. 

-Neelix