First newspost coming FROM the Pyra!

[Foxgod]

Great! Time to persistently check the forum everyday to see if the pre orders are up , My voucher is ready!

 

[rygD]

So do the prepreorder buyers need to use that voucher to preorder, or are we good until it comes time to pay for the rest?

 

[_wb_]

If they are not causing 100% CPU usage, it DOES idle. You can't say it's now "without any powersaving", the SoC itself should already fully power save.

So if I understand correctly, the idle powersaving should already be working.

But ED did get quite some heat when doing nothing, so that suggests that it's not going idle enough to consume only power on the screen. Maybe the constant interrupts from those peripherals (or maybe even from X redrawing the screen or something like that) do prevent the CPU/SoC from actually entering the deepest sleep idle mode? Do you think there's margin for improvement there?

@ED: can you somehow shut down most of the peripherals like wifi/4G and see if you can get the interrupt count down to near-zero, and then measure the power consumption / battery life / temperature?

 

[r2d2sipcup]

Hi, so is getting one without a touchscreen really an option? Or that's just wishful thinking by some other posters? I'd love to get one without a touchscreen as I don't need it. I'm still buying one either way, but if I could choose to not have the touchscreen, that would be great.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Hi, so is getting one without a touchscreen really an option? Or that's just wishful thinking by some other posters? I'd love to get one without a touchscreen as I don't need it. I'm still buying one either way, but if I could choose to not have the touchscreen, that would be great.

I think its just wishful thinking. The pyras specs are locked in place now and any changes would likely be costly.

 

[erico]

The heat test is nice and it seems to be doing as expected.
While one could render 3d on pyra, like an animation on blender, I´m not sure it would work out, but 3d modelling is definitely a feat.

I aslo think pyra will edit movies, at least on full hd, all fine. It could work out great as a system tool to dump shoots and pre-edit stuff on set.

 

[ingoreis]

Nice to Read Article..thx for writing it.
Maybe i will translate it soon onto the German Forum

8 Hours without Battery Saving sound realy good.
I am realy curious about testing the newer Nubs

 

[EvilDragon]

@ED: can you somehow shut down most of the peripherals like wifi/4G and see if you can get the interrupt count down to near-zero, and then measure the power consumption / battery life / temperature?

Not really right now (would need to ask Nikolaus how to do it), but top shows that X uses 8% CPU and three or four interrupts use 2% CPU each constantly, so that's pretty much.

On the Pandora, X uses 0,2 - 0,7% CPU, the interrupts don't need anything... and the CPU is a lot slower, as it's percentage, the real CPU power difference it a lot more

That's with Nikolaus absolutely unoptimized testing card (which is mostly there to test everything, so it's all enabled), I guess simply using aTcs OS which uses fbturbo as X driver will improve things a lot.

So yeah, something IS using a lot of CPU power right now, and that's most probably software optimization.

 

[levi]

So do the prepreorder buyers need to use that voucher to preorder, or are we good until it comes time to pay for the rest?

I assume the preorder (one 'pre-', note) will be where we pay the full price for the unit - just like it was when we bought our Pandoras, assuming you got involved at that stage*. The pre-preorder (two 'pre-'s there) is a voucher with a code and I assume we'll need to enter that code on the checkout page to get our pre-preorder discount back.

* Well it was meant to be the full price. That a certain person didn't calculate costs correctly, and many of us needed to make up the difference to actually get a unit was due to that unintentional screw-up.

 

[EvilDragon]

Nope The preorder price still will be only downpayment.
The Pre-Preorderers only had a higher risk, as no prototype was available back then.

The remaining price needs to be paid once the unit is sitting at my shop waiting to be shipped

 

[TrashyMG]

Nope The preorder price still will be only downpayment.
The Pre-Preorderers only had a higher risk, as no prototype was available back then.

The remaining price needs to be paid once the unit is sitting at my shop waiting to be shipped

Will pre-order be handled in order or will it be a free for all when actual ordering comes?

 

[Haraldur]

Nope The preorder price still will be only downpayment.
The Pre-Preorderers only had a higher risk, as no prototype was available back then.

The remaining price needs to be paid once the unit is sitting at my shop waiting to be shipped

Will there be an option to pay the full price up-front? I would rather get the "annoying" part (payment) completed immediately and then await the "fun" part (getting my device), rather than do the "annoying" part twice.

 

[Butterkeks]

Yep, my Pandora drops to 10-11 hours with wifi on and even further with everything on. So without everything on the Pyra should be pretty good (probably ~ 10ish hours)

Sounds great to me; definitely way better than my phone, which just keeps dying slowly...

 

[edgex004]

I'm sure this has already been discussed, but I wonder what sort of power savings we would see if the A9's were turned off and we were running only the M4's. I have audio running throughout the day, so my ideal scenario would be mp3 decoding on one M4 and telephony/email monitoring on the other M4.

 

[TrashyMG]

I'm sure this has already been discussed, but I wonder what sort of power savings we would see if the A9's were turned off and we were running only the M4's. I have audio running throughout the day, so my ideal scenario would be mp3 decoding on one M4 and telephony/email monitoring on the other M4.

Well the OMAP5 has A15s not A9s. But you can't run an OS off the M4s alone.

 

[edgex004]

@TrashyMG: Yep sorry I mis-typed. I guess I was mainly wondering if the majority of the OS could be suspended, but then a couple of processes could continue to run. I thought the M4's could at least handle mp3 decoding if that was the only process running.

 

[levi]

The M4s would probably have to have a single processing MP3 decoding application running, which can be controlled from the A15 side. The A15s could then sleep more often, although I'm not sure how the M4's access the system memory at the moment so the A15s will probably still need to be involved in getting data off the SD cards, and possibly queuing up data for the M4s.

However, I'm not sure even that is a good idea. The M4s are probably less efficient than the A15s, so it may not make sense to use them for this. I guess the main advantage they supply is that they could run some real-time code that's independent of the linux system, so if there's anything you need to do with hard real time aspects, regardless of how busy the A15s are or if they crash, put it on the M4s (some of the telephony stuff may count, but I suspect most of the hard real-time stuff there is handled by the GSM chip already).

 

[Swordfish II]

Sounds great to me; definitely way better than my phone, which just keeps dying slowly...

I hate having to charge my phone every day. I miss my old n900 with 3+ days of battery life... Shame stuff on it is constantly breaking (repos, data connection, no mms...)

 

[Exophase]

@TrashyMG: Yep sorry I mis-typed. I guess I was mainly wondering if the majority of the OS could be suspended, but then a couple of processes could continue to run. I thought the M4's could at least handle mp3 decoding if that was the only process running.

You can't run normal Pyra processes on the M4s at all, they use a different instruction set. It's ARMv7m (http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/beta/DDI0403D_arm_architecture_v7m_reference_manual.pdf) which is Thumb-2 only and doesn't have some of the more esoteric instructions, not to mention no NEON of course.

It might be possible to write something that uses a subset of ARMv7a and ARMv7m but even then a lot of extra things would have to happen to get the code to run on the M4s in a way that's managed at all by the OS.

 

[___]

...
I aslo think pyra will edit movies, at least on full hd, all fine. It could work out great as a system tool to dump shoots and pre-edit stuff on set.

Yeah, I wish. but I am sure that is not an option for professional videographers. If you are on set, every lost second is money that's going down the drain. So you really don't want to be dumping anything in that way. You'll want a hardware recorder writing to ssd/cfast and a direct sdi passthrough to your cutter, who'll need a setup that'll be a bit more capable and expensive then a pyra to do
on set editing efficiently. and do not underestimate video editing. it really depends on what you want to do, but my educated guess is, that 2gb ram will hardly be enough to edit any full hd sequences (you'd want at least 8gb, but for longer sequences 16gb or more is a must!), let a lone multi cam recordings and the likes.
yes, if you want to edit some home video stuff/trailer for a pyra software/youtube review of the pyra then it's not a problem. but if you have to work (as in: you are making your money as a cutter) this won't do by a long shot.