Actual specs?

[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