Colorful week

[Neelix]

Exciting would be getting to actually see the colours you've picked out for the cases and start picking favourites.

-Neelix

 

[CFWhitman]

Is it possible to have 4x samsung 2GB for 8GB total?

It doesn't really matter because doing so would be almost completely pointless with a 32 bit CPU as the Pyra currently has. Yes, the SoC that we're using can page memory to use more than the 32 bit limit, but in the real world hardly anyone would have a use that would significantly benefit from using paging for over half of the total RAM included. If we later get an SoC board with a 64 bit CPU, then we could benefit from more RAM to go with it.

 

[Xcl4m4t10n]

Videos of Dreamcast emulator running at full speed or the mailman ringing at my home with the Pyra in a box.

Spoiler

Sorry, just trolling a bit

 

[_jr_]

It doesn't really matter because doing so would be almost completely pointless with a 32 bit CPU as the Pyra currently has. Yes, the SoC that we're using can page memory to use more than the 32 bit limit, but in the real world hardly anyone would have a use that would significantly benefit from using paging for over half of the total RAM included. If we later get an SoC board with a 64 bit CPU, then we could benefit from more RAM to go with it.

While I agree that 8GB is mostly useless, nobody has yet provided actual arguments why the kernel cannot make the full 8GB available to applications (with each individual process being limited to its own 32bit memory layout) totally transparently. I haven't looked, the necessary support may not be implemented, but in theory it should work. Is there a significant performance penalty when page table entries have physical addresses larger than 32 bit (but AFAICT the physical memory architecture is the same for 64 bit ARM)?

 

[rygD]

ED, thanks for the update. I am looking forward to more news soon, especially about the case colors. I still can't decide, so maybe the pics will help.

@RAM discussion, I remember back when many people were telling me and the few others that expressed interest in more than 2GB that it would be useless. While that may or may not be true, nearly everyone has preordered a 4GB Pyra. I wonder what would have happened if there had also been an 8GB option.

 

[Djoga'Ro]

I wonder what would have happened if there had also been an 8GB option.

The sun would have risen in the east and set in the west.

 

[stevenc99]

Once there are prototypes out there and a few benchmarks have been run on them, I expect we'll see that the performance increase from 2GB to 4GB RAM is really huge (so having a 4GB option convinced me to preorder a Pyra at all), but I also expect diminishing returns beyond that as CPU performance becomes the next bottleneck.

I'd suggest 8GB RAM only for some future CPU board with quad cores.

 

[slaeshjag]

Why would 4 GB give any substantial performance gains?

 

[Bernd]

Why would 4 GB give any substantial performance gains?

By useing 2GB as Ram-Disk for example.

 

[levi]

Not needing to swap is the only reason I can think of. Which'd need some pretty data hungry games and apps to take more than 2GB by itself. I remember the original ARM chips had a limitation that one process could only run code from a limited amount of memory, I think 64MB if my maths is right.

Edit: RAM disc would only help for stuff you need to use again and again. If you only use it once, the time taken to copy it to ram disc equals or exceeds the time it would take to load it directly.

 

[edlee]

If you have more physical RAM, then you need to use less virtual memory that is swapped out to disk.

 

[Grench]

Why would 4 GB give any substantial performance gains?

In the vast majority of use cases it will not make a bit of performance gains. The only cases provided where it might are silly examples of intentional memory use/waste and impractical applications for the device.

In all cases, it will consume some amount of electrical power that may or may not be trivial. In all cases it has required the project to change the parts list, evaluate new parts, extend the project development time frame and resulted in a split to keep track of in production and inventory.

Why did the 4GB outsell the 2GB version? Hardly anybody buys the 'base' model of anything anymore. It's more expensive therefore it must be better, right?

It is a false-assumption to claim that 4GB unit purchasers would not have purchased a 2GB unit if the 4GB unit had not been offered.

Another false assumption is based on how people have become far to comfortable with the X86 Windows world code bloat that simply is not present in the Linux world. The reality is that 2GB under Linux functions like 8GB under Windows.

The above 8GB Pyra conversation is quite literally face-palm inducing.

 

[TrashyMG]

If you have more physical RAM, then you need to use less virtual memory that is swapped out to disk.

yeah except In an armhf Linux environment it takes a significant amount of effort to use all of 2GB of ram let alone 4GB.

EDIT: if someone mentiones using lots of browser tabs, you will most likely Load down the CPU before running out of memory...

 

[Grench]

By useing 2GB as Ram-Disk for example.

If you have more physical RAM, then you need to use less virtual memory that is swapped out to disk.

You two have very low post counts, so I'm going to cut you some slack on this.

What, please tell us, would you possibly want or need to run on a Pyra, pocketable handheld computer, that would require more than 2GB of RAM? If you're thinking about your Windows computer - stop, this isn't that.

The original Pandora had 256MB of RAM. The Rebirth and 1Ghz versions had 512MB of RAM. It was 4 years into the use of the Pandora before any applications needing more than 256MB of RAM became common - and /SWAP was used effectively. Using /swap on 512MB Pandoras was convenient in some cases. 2GB on a pocketable linux-ARM device is a lot. 4GB is a silly-lot of RAM.

So, what application(s) or use are you envisioning that would require more than 2GB of RAM that would take an intolerable performance hit by rolling some portion of it to a 100+MB/s /swap partition (or file) on an eMMC flash drive that would actually be suitable for doing on the OMAP CPU and the 5" screen of the Pyra?

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Doesn't Minecraft need more than 2 GB to run comfortably now?

 

[Plume]

As far as I know, having more RAM would have a positive impact in one case : Disk access caching. The RAM should still be faster than any available storage. However, one would need a very specific use case to really see a lot of improvement. My laptop has 4 GB of RAM and is configured to save the cache as late as possible and I rarely have more than 200 MB of cache in use.

 

[TheOldOne]

As I said before I can do 99.99% of what I want to do with the pyra with the 2GB version.
Edit: autocorrect is a thing of evil

 

[ZXDunny]

As I said before I can do 99.99% of what I want to do with the pyramid with the 2GB version.

Ha! Spotted the mobile user.

 

[sulu]

You two have very low post counts, so I'm going to cut you some slack on this.

That's insultingly patronising. And I'm not just saying that because I'm new myself.
The assumption that the post count says anything about the competence of a user is just wrong.

What, please tell us, would you possibly want or need to run on a Pyra, pocketable handheld computer, that would require more than 2GB of RAM?

You're mixing things up. Nobody in this thread said anything about a requirement. Apparently some people just prefer the extra reserve over price (and maybe power consumption).

That being said, I can think of two scenarios I might implement on the Pyra, that would profit from more RAM:
1. Virtual Machines: Often times I run several VMs in parallel that don't do a lot. They're basically just sitting there and waiting for something. So they don't stress the CPU a lot, but their memory overhead makes it comfortable to have more RAM.
2. Seeding torrents: My HTPC (an old notebook with 3GB of RAM) runs 24/7, partly because it runs one (sometimes two) of these idle VMs, partly because I put its idle uptime to good use by seeding a lot of the Debian images. Obviously these images combined are a lot bigger than the available RAM. So whenever I leave the machine alone for some hours, the images tend to push my user programs out of the cache, effectively increasing their next loading time. With more RAM I can delay that process. The upgrade from 2 to 3GB basically changed the situation from "barely tolerable" to "mostly fine".

 

[GizmoTheGreen]

imho it's better to have more RAM than you need that too little. \

VM's is a valid usecase, anything else I could think of is minecraft it loves to eat RAM, my fully modded package on my PC easily consumes 6GB+