For All The People Who Still Say It Doesn't Have Enough Ram....

[willrandship]

Just some interesting cross comparisons...

Pandora: Dev board 128MB, Official Release 256MB
Gamecube: 16MB DRAM, 24MB 1T SRAM
PS2: 32MB of Ram
Xbox: 64MB upgradable to 128MB (unofficially)
Even with the highest, the pandora's less powerful version still beats the official xbox version!
Plus, it's way too late for anything to change.

I hope this clears things up for people.

 

[Phawx]

I don't remember anyone saying this since Nov of 08

 

[Kramy]

The only people worried about RAM usage are the ones accustomed to Windows programs using 150MB to open a text file. (hyperbole)

I hate the bloat all these companies shovel out. I use freeware almost exclusively. My IM client uses about 5MB. My text editor uses about 1.5MB until I open something. My paint program uses perhaps 20MB - but it has a lot of plugins. My browser... well, my browser is Firefox, so it uses 250MB+ most of the time, but it has lots of addons.

My point? Don't make assumptions about memory usage... or CPU usage. Desktop software is pretty inefficient, and a lot of unnoticeable stuff can be stripped out or made more efficient.

 

[VRAndy]

I don't think anyone has said that it doesn't have enough ram ... to play games. So ... those comparisons aren't really fair.

Some people have been concerned that it's palm-top computing capabilities will be weak without more ram. I don't agree at all. (Though more ram is always better, of course.)

I think the people concerned about performance don't have a good emotional understanding of how small this device will be, and are comparing it to a laptop or even a desktop. Sure, if I was going to do heavy photo-editing, I'd want more ram so I could have a zillion layers and a gajillion undo states without going to cache. But it's just not realistic to imagine doing that on a pocket computer.

Bottom line, I think you're right, Pandora will have plenty of ram. But not because it has more than the GameCube!

My text editor uses about 1.5MB until I open something.

gvim.exe 1,368K = 1.34MB

I WIN! Woo!

Except on paint programs. Both Inkscape and Gimp take about 40mb each, all total. Under Windows, at least. What do you use?

 

[willrandship]

Well, I think it should be there just for some idiot who stumbles onto the forums.

Also, Iphone 3gs will have 256 mb, so sounds like a fair match for PDA abilities!

Who doubts palmtop computing? DSL can take up 50 mb of the ram of a 256MB ram PC and still run super smooth! and still with all of those inefficiencies you mentioned.

The main reason I mentioned consoles is because the FAQ only talks about other handhelds, which could give people the wrong idea.

 

[fearofshorts]

Well, I think it should be there just for some idiot who stumbles onto the forums.

Also, Iphone 3gs will have 256 mb, so sounds like a fair match for PDA abilities!

Who doubts palmtop computing? DSL can take up 50 mb of the ram of a 256MB ram PC and still run super smooth! and still with all of those inefficiencies you mentioned.

The main reason I mentioned consoles is because the FAQ only talks about other handhelds, which could give people the wrong idea.

OOH! Don't get us all started on the iPhone. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we hate when people compare the Pandora to the iPhone 3gs. It is not a competitor to the Pandora. Full stop. The Pandora is designed for an entirely different market.

Also, on the topic of Damn Small Linux, have you tried Turbopup Xtreme? it runs even smoother and only takes up 10 MB of RAM!

 

[bzar]

My browser... well, my browser is Firefox, so it uses 250MB+ most of the time, but it has lots of addons.

AFAIK Firefox uses a lot of that memory to cache all the pages you go to and will free it in a heartbeat if memory starts getting low. It's just used to make your browsing faster. You can use Firefox with a lot less memory than 250MB.

 

[kingoddball]

256MB of RAM is a good amount. Really.

With ED and all other Dev's creating the operating System designed for the Pandora ONLY. It will be great.

Game systems do not need as much RAM as they can not run entire operating systems designed for end users to "interface" with.
The Xbox is not an exception. It was hacked and they made a Linux distro run on it using the 64MB ram and the 600-700mhz Celeron core.

As for Windows/Linux/Mac - Firefox is pretty bloated. Over 64MB RAM is needed to run it.

 

[Kramy]

My browser... well, my browser is Firefox, so it uses 250MB+ most of the time, but it has lots of addons.

AFAIK Firefox uses a lot of that memory to cache all the pages you go to and will free it in a heartbeat if memory starts getting low. It's just used to make your browsing faster. You can use Firefox with a lot less memory than 250MB.

Unfortunately, it tends to free the memory after my game crashes when I run out.

Someone needs to rethink how this works. There needs to be an API/daemon available that instructs programs on how they should behave. It should keep a list of how much memory the programs think they can free, and then have callbacks that ask the programs to free their unimportant stuff.

Maybe design an API/daemon with methods such as "suggestFreeMemory(iAmount)", "registerUselessFreeableMemory(iAmount)", "registerFreeableMemory(iAmount)", and "registerImportantFreeableMemory(iAmount)"

The Vista defrag apparently uses several gigabytes to "enhance performance" slightly, if it's available. And yet if you're defragging a second drive, and then want to play a game while you wait... you'll suddenly discover that you lack the RAM for the game to even start. And then Firefox will begin paging everything to the HDD because it ran out of RAM, too. I really think such a daemon would be a good idea - but I don't have the knowledge or sway to create such a thing.

 

[SNESFAN]

here some tech specs from some android phones out there and just to put in compareison as well. Seeing how there's a port of android being worked on I figured someone might care to see how it stacks up with android devices.

nexus one (android 2.1)
Qualcomm QSD 8250 1 GHz
512MB Flash
512MB RAM

moto droid (android 2.0)
Arm® Cortex™ A8 processor 550 mHz
RAM+capacity: 256 MiB
ROM+capacity: 512 MiB

htc hero (android 1.5/1.6)
Qualcomm® MSM7200A™, 528 MHz
ROM: 512 MB
RAM: 288 MB

htc g1 (android 1.5)
Qualcomm® MSM7201A™, 528 MHz
ROM: 256 MB
RAM: 192 MB

as you can see... it's not top of the line, but it fits in well with some of the best ones out there today. There's other ones but the specs seem to be pretty standard. I can personally contend to the fact that if you are running the latest and greatest (android 2.1) on a device with 256 (ish... htc hero) it starts to show where it could definately use more ram and proc power.

 

[Bigun]

The only people worried about RAM usage are the ones accustomed to Windows programs using 150MB to open a text file. (hyperbole)

I hate the bloat all these companies shovel out. I use freeware almost exclusively. My IM client uses about 5MB. My text editor uses about 1.5MB until I open something. My paint program uses perhaps 20MB - but it has a lot of plugins. My browser... well, my browser is Firefox, so it uses 250MB+ most of the time, but it has lots of addons.

My point? Don't make assumptions about memory usage... or CPU usage. Desktop software is pretty inefficient, and a lot of unnoticeable stuff can be stripped out or made more efficient.

++

All my MS-lovin' friends still cringe and wonder why I use GIMP, J-Edit, and so forth on my work machine. I just shake my head.

When I'm forced to open MS-SQL Manager or Visual Studios, I watch nearly ALL my resources get eaten... then I turn and look at them and say, "That's why".

 

[paulguy]

iPhone os does have that free unneeded memory signalling mechanism. Fitting it in to Linux and having all the programs able to catch the signals and act on them would be quite an effort though.

 

[fusion_power]

Even, if this is not a straight comparison, I find it still interesting, how the old Consoles were able to deal with such low RAM and ROM Memory. AFAIK it was not much more than 2-4MB Rom onto Megadrive Modules and only a few KB of RAM. But they were able to put huge games into it with many levels ("Kid Chameleon" AFAIK over 100 Levels) and everything in 16 Bit Graphics. I'm sure, they didn't use Bitmaps. XD
AND the ROM of "Mario 64" is only 8 MB for such a huge 3D Game. I don't know any PC Game equal ammount of 3D content that only needs 8MB.

Today, everything seems so unoptimized and bloated, (even in Homebrew sometimes) (usage .wav files instead of mp3 or ogg, or even worse uncompressed Bitmaps instead of PNG...) I hope we will see a effective usage of ressources again. And yes, I think a good Coder can do MANY things with 256MB of RAM.

 

[Yoyobuae]

Well, on Linux there is the disk caching mechanism. So maybe they should just write out the cache to disk, the disk cache will speed up any reads later on, as long as the data remains on cache.

The kernel manages the disk cache, so there is no need to ask programs to free unneeded memory or anything. Although some way may be needed to find out if the data is cached on RAM or not, so the program can react accordingly (or maybe there is, I don't know).

EDIT:
@fusion_power: Old 8-bit/16-bit era consoles used space efficient tile mechanisms (the same tile image repeated many times) and palletes (the image uses a reduced number of colors, reducing the amount of bits per pixel, say 4 bits instead of 8 or 16). Also lower resolutions where involved.

It all comes to show that the need for 32-bit colors, 1080p resolutions, high quality 3D, etc just isn't there. A game can be fun, even pretty without much of it. It all comes to the design of the game more than anything.

 

[mcobit]

Well, on Linux there is the disk caching mechanism. So maybe they should just write out the cache to disk, the disk cache will speed up any reads later on, as long as the data remains on cache.

The kernel manages the disk cache, so there is no need to ask programs to free unneeded memory or anything. Although some way may be needed to find out if the data is cached on RAM or not, so the program can react accordingly (or maybe there is, I don't know).

Disk swapping may be too slow, especially on sdcard or the nand.

 

[Yoyobuae]

The Linux kernel keeps a copy of the recently accessed disk data on RAM, and it uses this copy to speed up disk reads substantially. This is the "disk caching" I'm refering to.

 

[mcobit]

Ok, convinced.

 

[WizardStan]

AFAIK Firefox uses a lot of that memory to cache all the pages you go to and will free it in a heartbeat if memory starts getting low. It's just used to make your browsing faster. You can use Firefox with a lot less memory than 250MB.

And yet (this after a week or so of surfing, mind), my 512MB machine would be forced to start swapping due to the sheer size of the memory cache Firefox was creating. I had a ticket open for it that was moved around and ignored. I eventually solved it by buying a computer with more ram, and shutting down every night so the cache couldn't get that large.
Still crashes when I open a few hundred tabs though. But I love Firefox, and it loves me. The beatings are just to show how much it cares.

 

[bzar]

AFAIK Firefox uses a lot of that memory to cache all the pages you go to and will free it in a heartbeat if memory starts getting low. It's just used to make your browsing faster. You can use Firefox with a lot less memory than 250MB.

And yet (this after a week or so of surfing, mind), my 512MB machine would be forced to start swapping due to the sheer size of the memory cache Firefox was creating. I had a ticket open for it that was moved around and ignored. I eventually solved it by buying a computer with more ram, and shutting down every night so the cache couldn't get that large.
Still crashes when I open a few hundred tabs though. But I love Firefox, and it loves me. The beatings are just to show how much it cares.

In that case, I stand corrected. I've never had any problems with it, so I thought it works as advertised. Bummer if it doesn't

 

[Gerix]

My desktop doesn't routinely use 256MB of RAM, at least not in Linux. Granted, I did choose XFCE4 as my desktop manager. But still, 256MB is a lot when you think about it...