Comprehensive Status update!

[Pocak]

(32-bit wide ddr3 devices do not exist)

But a search for "x32 ddr3" does bring up some products. It's just not a JEDEC standard.

 

[zmatt]

But a search for "x32 ddr3" does bring up some products. It's just not a JEDEC standard.

OK, so I guess they do exist, although they're clearly non-standard, obscure, and are apparently just multi-chip packages meant for footprint reduction.

 

[Yuji Sakai]

Could you please make 8GB version? it (with PAE kernel), would be exact size of memory I want.
CPU is rather enough (but for some use cases it may be still to weak)
modem is great (YAY LTE+calling - I would be able to leave my N900 at home).
Full hardware QWERTY+gaming buttons (YAY dreamed of)

so even with high price I may decide to buy soon (if there is not 8GB i probably buy 4GB one).
soon because I want to catch on first batch (to not wait for anoter one)

thanks ED for such device

PS: of course additional memory costs, and I prefer 8GB than 4GB even if it is rather costful (to not upgrade CPU board too soon).

 

[WizardStan]

Could you please make 8GB version? it (with PAE kernel), would be exact size of memory I want.

What is it you want that much for? It's been categorically demonstrated that 2GB is more than enough for pretty much everything, including some major web browsing. 4GB is just icing on the cake for future proofing and those that want to run virtual machines.

 

[slaeshjag]

PAE kernel isn't really unique to a hypothetical 8 GB version, it'll be needed for the 4 GB version as well.

 

[Yuji Sakai]

5GB or 6GB probably could be enough, but they arent power of 2
seriously, I want to be able to play a game on wine/qemu which itself pushes to limit of 4GB (and libraries from wine etc. also uses memory and of course system)
another usage case is running a game on QEMU which is itself 64bit and sometimes exceed 3GB or 4GB limit, but yet there is not enough to exceed 8GB (which is still enough for most cases and I hope it will still be enough)
another case is just putting 2GB-3GB ramdrive and have fun

 

[Letalis Sonus]

seriously, I want to be able to play a game on wine/qemu which itself pushes to limit of 4GB (and libraries from wine etc. also uses memory and of course system)
another usage case is running a game on QEMU which is itself 64bit and sometimes exceed 3GB or 4GB limit, but yet there is not enough to exceed 8GB (which is still enough for most cases and I hope it will still be enough)

...and you seriously think that a game that handles that much memory comes even close to being able to output even a single frame per second, especially within an emulator? What twisted kind of witchery would that be?

The Pandora is barely able to run a lightweight Win95 within Qemu, only few games run enjoyable.

 

[Yuji Sakai]

Pyra would succeed
and the example games are strategy games with bad memory management (or they don't care), and stuffed up with 3rd party modifications (AKA Mods).
one of examples is Civ4BTS + C2C (they already disabled most of animations for RAM to not exceed the 4GB, they did two mechanisms of cashing and for bigger maps it may be still enouugh ram). I don't care here for framerate as most of renders are frozen, fluent scrolliing is enough.
But I agree that newest games which already use the capabilities of 64-bit memory may (for another reason) choke on graphics or CPU.

I wish Pyra could run at least XP and it probably is within it's power.
But fix me wrong: wine works as generic windows emulator with replacement libraries for microsoft ones (i.e. translates DX into openGL) not the particular version of system?

EDIT: Yeah I know CPU could be sometimes bottleneck when simulating another machine, but on things I think about the RAM is bottleneck. If I set the details to minimum it still have huge hunger for memory. for Turn strategies fluffy graphics or tons of fps are not needed (somebody counted 20-25 fps is enough but only if display is at least 60Hz).

 

[Letalis Sonus]

But fix me wrong: wine works as generic windows emulator with replacement libraries for microsoft ones (i.e. translates DX into openGL) not the particular version of system?.

We don't even have OpenGL, we only have OpenGL ES. OpenGL can only be achieved through GLES wrapper libraries like glshim, which only supports OpenGL 1.x - that means: no DX9, no OpenGL 2.0+

Yeah I know CPU could be sometimes bottleneck when simulating another machine

"Sometimes"? Read up about the difference between virtualization and emulation. We're talking about emulation here, it takes several times the CPU power of the target machine, even the most versatile speedup mechanics like a JIT can't change that.

 

[Yuji Sakai]

So WINE+QEMU works in similair way as dosbox? some people managed to run win95 on dosbox on n900, so I hope Pyra would be capable of WINE compatible with WinXP or better.
We don't have OpenGL, or we don't have OpenGL acceleration? if first it's sad (we couldn't run dx9 games in wine) if second ir's acceptable (it work on software so it's much slower).
Is it possible to use virtualization of x86 or AMD64 architecture inside CPU in Pyra? Anyway I wish 8GB version

 

[TrashyMG]

So WINE+QEMU works in similair way as dosbox? some people managed to run win95 on dosbox on n900, so I hope Pyra would be capable of WINE compatible with WinXP or better.
We don't have OpenGL, or we don't have OpenGL acceleration? if first it's sad (we couldn't run dx9 games in wine) if second ir's acceptable (it work on software so it's much slower).
Is it possible to use virtualization of x86 or AMD64 architecture inside CPU in Pyra? Anyway I wish 8GB version

QEMU is extremely slow, however there is a commercial product called "Exagear Desktop" that does this much better, also as a person playing on the 2GB OMAP5 devboard for the last couple years I can say for certain that 4GB is way more than needed for just about any use. 8GB is just wasting battery life.

@Yuji Sakai
I made a few videos long ago, showing off Exagear Desktop. Basically Exagear gives you a X86 Linux environment running in a image file from there you can run WINE. It's very CPU taxing, but allows some software to work fine. This was before getting the 3D acceleration working properly, sometime in the near future I was to investigate getting the glshim environment working with it, but not sure how well things will work with it yet.

x86 Linux Steam: Never Winter Nights - WINE: Civ4 -WINE: (Starts, but never starts a game, most likely CPU load): Diablo 2 - WINE: (We have a native port now thanks to static recompiling):

 

[bzar]

So WINE+QEMU works in similair way as dosbox? some people managed to run win95 on dosbox on n900, so I hope Pyra would be capable of WINE compatible with WinXP or better.
We don't have OpenGL, or we don't have OpenGL acceleration? if first it's sad (we couldn't run dx9 games in wine) if second ir's acceptable (it work on software so it's much slower).
Is it possible to use virtualization of x86 or AMD64 architecture inside CPU in Pyra? Anyway I wish 8GB version

Just a quick question: how many FPS do you consider a playable framerate for the games you intend to play? Also note that when bottlenecked by CPU, it's not just jerky graphics, but also slower all-round operation you'll be getting. Even for turn based games, there's a point where playing at 6FPS gets strictly unplayable not because of the jerky animation, but because everything takes ten times as long to happen.

Also a note: I may be mistaken, but you seem to be using windows versions as some kind of measurement for the kinds of games that would be playable. This is not a good metric in my opinion, as games aimed for a platform vary wildly in their hardware requirements. Within limits of available memory, anything can be made "compatible" with anything, but the running speed may be below a frame a minute.

All in all: you're a LOT more likely to run into issues with a game running too slowly to bother than running out of memory.

 

[Letalis Sonus]

(it work on software so it's much slower).

Try playing with llvmpipe on your desktop machine, you'll be in for a nasty surprise...

 

[_jr_]

Try playing with llvmpipe on your desktop machine, you'll be in for a nasty surprise...

When using 32x24 resolution it's working fine