Gp2x Vs Pandora

[Squidge]

Does anyone know if the battery is on the outside of the machine and easily swapable while you are out (like laptops), or is it permanently inside and tools are needed to change it (like ipods)

It will be on the inside, but easily reachable through a cover secured with a single screw.

I know where your coming from, but I think in this case we can take into account the different clock speeds. Both are ARM based procesors. It's not like we are comaring ARM to x86.

Not really, Pandora has more processors than gp2x, and the ARM Cortex MCU is different than the MMSP2 inside the GP2X (for example, instruction extensions such as Neon). With correct code, the Pandora will be able to flatten the gp2x quite easily even at the same clock speed.

 

[Pickle]

Not really, Pandora has more processors than gp2x, and the ARM Cortex MCU is different than the MMSP2 inside the GP2X (for example, instruction extensions such as Neon). With correct code, the Pandora will be able to flatten the gp2x quite easily even at the same clock speed.

What about in terms of unoptimized application just running normal ARM? Would there be any hw differences? My assumption is that the ARM decode pipe would be similar, would that be incorrect?

And by more processors your refering the PowerVR chip? In my comments I wasnt not considering this a factor.
Using the PowerVR would of course be a level above the GP2X entirely.

 

[Exophase]

MHZ mean absolutely nothing! I'm not saying the Pandora isn't a faster machine, but don't compare mhz ratings across different processors, it is meaningless.

MHz mean a hell of a lot in this case, you can bet anything that at the same clock speed ARM Cortex-A8 will outperform ARM920T, at over 3x the clock speed it's just obvious.

In terms of console emulation, it probably won't buy much. PSX, N64, Jaguar, 32x, higher gba comp. and thats about it.

Where do you get "higher GBA compatibility", it's not going to improve GBA compatibility because I don't sacrifice compatibility for performance. GBA compatibility is already pretty good, whatever problems that are there are from bugs or inaccuracies that can be fixed on both the GP2X and Pandora versions. Other platforms I could see it getting decent to good to fullspeed emulation of that GP2X can't, depending on how high the clock speed can go (for the sake of argument let's say that 1GHz might be attainable at least by some, maybe it won't be but it's a distinct possibility):

- Nintendo DS
- NEC PC-FX (yeah I know no one has heard of this thing but it has cool hardware)
- Amiga CD32
- Nintendo Virtualboy
- Sega Saturn (yeah I know how complex the platform is, go away)
- Dreamcast (okay, kinda a stretch but I wouldn't write it off completely)

But all of those would require some new work to be done. At the very least it'll be a good platform for trying to do things like this, if anyone has the energy for it.

And I'm not so sure about the Jaguar or N64. The N64 is a pretty powerful system and the Saturn and Jag by their architecture are difficult to emulate. Now, the small library of the Jag makes it easier.

If we can do N64 at around the same level that PSP can clock for clock then I don't think we have anything to worry about, this is assuming there won't be any major complications in using the NEON registers to emulate floating point. Jaguar is quite a bit simpler than Saturn and Firefox insists that Pandora will be able to handle it.

 

[Pickle]

MHZ mean absolutely nothing! I'm not saying the Pandora isn't a faster machine, but don't compare mhz ratings across different processors, it is meaningless.

MHz mean a hell of a lot in this case, you can bet anything that at the same clock speed ARM Cortex-A8 will outperform ARM920T, at over 3x the clock speed it's just obvious.


Thats the point ive been tyring to get across.

 

[garykerr06]

Everyone always talks about N64 emulation, but does anyone actually consider that consoles joypad? So what if a system is powerful enough to emulate it, if it doesn't control right, it doesn't play right. And i don't want to spoil anyones party here, but an Asus Eee PC goes for £220, and is far more powerful than the Pandora. Heres the specs:

SPECIFICATIONS:
900MHz Intel Celeron M; 512MB DDR2 RAM; 4GB solid-state flash disk; integrated graphics; 7in 800 x 480 TFT; D-SUB out; integrated high-definition audio; 3 x USB2; 802.11b/g WLAN; SD card reader; 0.3-megapixel webcam; Linux OS; 1yr RTB warranty.

And note that Asus has recently removed the RAM expansion restriction, meaning another 512mb can be added easily. I know the Eee PC qualifies as a laptop, and is larger than Pandora, but it still seems like a better purchase in my opinion.

And don't assume I'm a GP2X fanboy (if they exist) I don't even have mine yet, but hopefully its on its merry way from Korea right now.

 

[atomicthumbs]

- NEC PC-FX (yeah I know no one has heard of this thing but it has cool hardware)

I've heard of it.

 

[Exophase]

Everyone always talks about N64 emulation, but does anyone actually consider that consoles joypad? So what if a system is powerful enough to emulate it, if it doesn't control right, it doesn't play right. And i don't want to spoil anyones party here, but an Asus Eee PC goes for £220, and is far more powerful than the Pandora. Heres the specs:

SPECIFICATIONS:
900MHz Intel Celeron M; 512MB DDR2 RAM; 4GB solid-state flash disk; integrated graphics; 7in 800 x 480 TFT; D-SUB out; integrated high-definition audio; 3 x USB2; 802.11b/g WLAN; SD card reader; 0.3-megapixel webcam; Linux OS; 1yr RTB warranty.

And note that Asus has recently removed the RAM expansion restriction, meaning another 512mb can be added easily. I know the Eee PC qualifies as a laptop, and is larger than Pandora, but it still seems like a better purchase in my opinion.

Let's see, you start off by saying that if a platform doesn't have proper controls then it's no good for emulation. Then you go on to promote the Eee PC, which doesn't have gaming controls at all and therefore should be inadequate for emulating almost any gaming platform ever made.

I've played Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time on a Microsoft Sidewinder gamepad (with the Corn and UltraHLE emulators, several years ago). It wasn't that bad at all, with the main missing component being the analog stick. Pandora has the analog stick(s) and it has extra buttons nearby.

I've also played those games using a keyboard. It was unbearable. I think I'll take the Pandora over the Eee for N64, thanks. Or any other game consoles or handhelds.

Besides, Eee's hardware doesn't look that great to me - the CPU might be more powerful (how much depends on what clock speeds Pandora's will be able to reach) but the 3D capabilities are probably well behind. Yes, it has more RAM, but I'm not convinced that'll matter a lot with the right software being ran (moreover, the software people are really interested in running on this). Eee also has the "advantage" of running code written for x86 PC's which is by and large slower and more bloated than code written for embedded ARM devices. I wouldn't be that surprised to see the super fast ARM handheld overtake the sluggish laptop a lot of the time just for that reason. Eee will probably also have a much worse battery life and more expensive to replace batteries.

But when you get down to it you know full well that they're not comparable devices. If you think Eee is a better use of your money then that's fine, but you'd practically may as well be saying that you feel better off spending the money on a TV or a plane ticket to visit your parents. Yes, there are things that both platforms will be able to do well but I can think of a lot of things that one will excel at that the other will fail miserably at. They're not competing, and I wish people would stop acting like they are.

And don't assume I'm a GP2X fanboy (if they exist) I don't even have mine yet, but hopefully its on its merry way from Korea right now.

Oh, they do exist, just search for posts by MaGaIn. You don't appear to be a GP2X fanboy just because you're not casting your vote for Pandora. You do appear to be a bit of an Eee fanboy though ;P

 

[Squidge]

What about in terms of unoptimized application just running normal ARM? Would there be any hw differences? My assumption is that the ARM decode pipe would be similar, would that be incorrect?

No, it would be very similar in those cases. I would assume however that most people would at least recompile there apps, even if they didn't make any changes to the source code. This would take more advantage of the hardware.

And by more processors your refering the PowerVR chip?

Well, the PowerVR is one (and in part, so is IVA and ISP), but even without them, the statement still holds.

 

[christo930]

MHZ mean absolutely nothing! I'm not saying the Pandora isn't a faster machine, but don't compare mhz ratings across different processors, it is meaningless.

MHz mean a hell of a lot in this case, you can bet anything that at the same clock speed ARM Cortex-A8 will outperform ARM920T, at over 3x the clock speed it's just obvious.

You know as well as I do that you cannot get good performance information from comparing different chips clock speed. We know it's faster, but how much. It has 3x the clock speed, but is probably more than 3x as fast. That was the point I was trying to make.

In terms of console emulation, it probably won't buy much. PSX, N64, Jaguar, 32x, higher gba comp. and thats about it.

Where do you get "higher GBA compatibility", it's not going to improve GBA compatibility because I don't sacrifice compatibility for performance. GBA compatibility is already pretty good, whatever problems that are there are from bugs or inaccuracies that can be fixed on both the GP2X and Pandora versions. Other platforms I could see it getting decent to good to fullspeed emulation of that GP2X can't, depending on how high the clock speed can go (for the sake of argument let's say that 1GHz might be attainable at least by some, maybe it won't be but it's a distinct possibility):

That seems like an awfull high rate of overclock from 600mhz to 1ghz, thats 40%. Seems awful high to me

EDIT - It's actually a 66% overclock 400 is 2/3 of 600.

As you know, the more games you want to run, the more perfect the emulation needs to be. For example, in Mame there are many arcade machines that are only partially emulated because they only need to implement the hardware well enough for that one game to work and that one game may not use all the features of the hardware. So that's why I said that. I haven't played too many gba games but the ones I have played have worked pretty well. It sounds by what you said that you are the dev on that project. Congratulations and thanks.

- Nintendo DS
Do you think this one is realistic? I have no idea myself. I've heard it was unlikely given the published specs of the Pandora.

- NEC PC-FX (yeah I know no one has heard of this thing but it has cool hardware)
There are hundreds of obscure systems. I'm sure I left out 90% of them.
Do you think Sharp X68000 will be possible?
- Amiga CD32
This is just an Amiga 500 with a cd drive. If you hook a cd-rom to an amiga 500 you can play the games. There is some piece of software you need, I forget what it's called.

- Nintendo Virtualboy

Not in any real sense.

- Sega Saturn (yeah I know how complex the platform is, go away)
- Dreamcast (okay, kinda a stretch but I wouldn't write it off completely)

I'll believe it when I see it. As far as the Saturn goes, almost all the 3rd party software is available as psx, so why bother. There are a few very good games that are Saturn only, but is it really worth the effort?

But all of those would require some new work to be done. At the very least it'll be a good platform for trying to do things like this, if anyone has the energy for it.

And I'm not so sure about the Jaguar or N64. The N64 is a pretty powerful system and the Saturn and Jag by their architecture are difficult to emulate. Now, the small library of the Jag makes it easier.

If we can do N64 at around the same level that PSP can clock for clock then I don't think we have anything to worry about, this is assuming there won't be any major complications in using the NEON registers to emulate floating point. Jaguar is quite a bit simpler than Saturn and Firefox insists that Pandora will be able to handle it.

The Jag isn't really bringing much to the table. I thought it was a good system at the time, but there are only a few good games for the system. I don't follow the psp stuff, so I am unaware of any good progress to the N64 on that platform, but you sound pretty sure so I'll take you at your word.

Chris

 

[fusion_power]

With correct code, the Pandora will be able to flatten the gp2x quite easily even at the same clock speed.

That's what I wanted to hear! When the time is right, please make some Benchmarks with 1:1 MHz settings between Pandora and GP2X.

 

[christo930]

Everyone always talks about N64 emulation, but does anyone actually consider that consoles joypad? So what if a system is powerful enough to emulate it, if it doesn't control right, it doesn't play right. And i don't want to spoil anyones party here, but an Asus Eee PC goes for £220, and is far more powerful than the Pandora. Heres the specs:

SPECIFICATIONS:
900MHz Intel Celeron M; 512MB DDR2 RAM; 4GB solid-state flash disk; integrated graphics; 7in 800 x 480 TFT; D-SUB out; integrated high-definition audio; 3 x USB2; 802.11b/g WLAN; SD card reader; 0.3-megapixel webcam; Linux OS; 1yr RTB warranty.

And note that Asus has recently removed the RAM expansion restriction, meaning another 512mb can be added easily. I know the Eee PC qualifies as a laptop, and is larger than Pandora, but it still seems like a better purchase in my opinion.

And don't assume I'm a GP2X fanboy (if they exist) I don't even have mine yet, but hopefully its on its merry way from Korea right now.

I just bought a laptop for about 1 1/2 as much as the high end eee (it was 650) it has a 17" screen 2 2ghz processors and a decent graphics card, but guess what? IT DON'T FIT IN MY POCKET!!!!!!!!! How can you possibly compare a laptop to a handheld gaming system. They just aren't the same thing. If you want to compare it to computers, than compare it to ppc. At least that will fit in your pocket. And believe me, I am no Pandora fan boy.

Chris

 

[hlidegp2x]

With correct code, the Pandora will be able to flatten the gp2x quite easily even at the same clock speed.

That's what I wanted to hear! When the time is right, please make some Benchmarks with 1:1 MHz settings between Pandora and GP2X.


One thing to know is that GP2X has no scalar or vector float point coprocessor, whereas Pandora has both (mainly thanks to Neon of Cortex-A8), so if an application may benefit of them, Pandora would largely outperform gp2x. 3d games would really benefit of them. And emulators probably would do as well supposedly it could make a sense to use them.

Not only that, if the application really uses the potential of the PowerVR SGX (true OpenGL as far as I know), Pandora will also largely outperform GP2X.

So, yes, just comparing performance between GP2X and Pandora with the same code is not a good indication of the real potential of Pandora, but just gives you the minimal performance ratio you can get with Pandora against GP2X.

 

[dockthepod]

What about in terms of unoptimized application just running normal ARM? Would there be any hw differences? My assumption is that the ARM decode pipe would be similar, would that be incorrect?

No, it would be very similar in those cases. I would assume however that most people would at least recompile there apps, even if they didn't make any changes to the source code. This would take more advantage of the hardware.



Squidge, are you implying here that GP2X apps will run on Pandora without a recompile? Very interesting if so.

 

[sukhi-2006]

I did make mistake writing gp2x has decent specs, if not better than pandora well it should be other way around.

English my first lauguage you must be joking can't you tell from my name what i am i'm no european bloke haha figure this one out.

I disagree on you lot saying clockspeed is nothing special, let's take the psx emulator on gp2x the machine is lacking 3d accelerator, which making the 3d games run slow and about 250mhz clockspeed the games do speed up and play much faster than 200mhz speed, then we have the jag emulator which firefox had overclock of 250mhz and tempest 2000 looked quite fast compare to the old version of the emulator, definetely cpu does increase speed up the games try psx and jag emu and see the speed increase using more clockspeed.

here is a example running psx game (street fighter collection) on gp2x with 200mhz is very slow, and using 270mhz the game goes faster, i don't think most 2d games fun full speed because the cpu on it's own won't help it needs 3d accelerator which the psx is an 3d hardware if gp2x had 3d accelearator the psx emu would have been full speed this is most disavantage of the gp2x.

I can't believe gph what was thinking of releasing gp2x f-200 without 3d accelerator it was new console released with no 3d hardware support, that would have been nice improvement over gp2x f-100.

 

[yaustar]

Squidge, are you implying here that GP2X apps will run on Pandora without a recompile? Very interesting if so.

Yes.

 

[christo930]

I did make mistake writing gp2x has decent specs, if not better than pandora well it should be other way around.

English my first lauguage you must be joking can't you tell from my name what i am i'm no european bloke haha figure this one out.

I disagree on you lot saying clockspeed is nothing special, let's take the psx emulator on gp2x the machine is lacking 3d accelerator, which making the 3d games run slow and about 250mhz clockspeed the games do speed up and play much faster than 200mhz speed, then we have the jag emulator which firefox had overclock of 250mhz and tempest 2000 looked quite fast compare to the old version of the emulator, definetely cpu does increase speed up the games try psx and jag emu and see the speed increase using more clockspeed.

here is a example running psx game (street fighter collection) on gp2x with 200mhz is very slow, and using 270mhz the game goes faster, i don't think most 2d games fun full speed because the cpu on it's own won't help it needs 3d accelerator which the psx is an 3d hardware if gp2x had 3d accelearator the psx emu would have been full speed this is most disavantage of the gp2x.

I can't believe gph what was thinking of releasing gp2x f-200 without 3d accelerator it was new console released with no 3d hardware support, that would have been nice improvement over gp2x f-100.

You are totally missing the point with clock speeds. In the examples you cite above, the cpu is the same, but running at different speeds. That is a very valid speed comparison. The problem arises when you compare different cpu's. It is useless to take 2 different processors and compare their clock speed. Back before Apple switched to intel chips, consumers would often make the mistake of comparing the clock speeds of a ppc chip and a Intel Pentium chip and say if the G4 is running at 500mhz and the p2 is running at 550mhz than the P2 must be faster. This simply isn't true. They are not even the same type of chip, let alone the same family. So if you say an arm 9 at 200mhz is twice as fast as an arm9 at 100mhz then you are right. But if you say an arm 9 at 400mhz is twice as fast as Pentium at 200mhz you would be wrong. At many things, the Pentium would be many times faster, for instance in floating point arithmetic. This is a simplified answer, but I think it illustrates the point.

CChris

 

[Game_over]

Yeah I remember all of that, Intel did a crappy job of educating the consumer about that and in some cases use that to their advantage, look how they branded the processors in laptops. But thats for another topic.

This is turning into a decent discussion thank you Sukhi.

 

[dabomb3627]

I can't believe gph what was thinking of releasing gp2x f-200 without 3d accelerator it was new console released with no 3d hardware support, that would have been nice improvement over gp2x f-100.

uhhhh if you actually looked into things like you should and like we do, you would know the reason GPH split from game park is because they wanted to stick with 2d (which i believe was pointless) where as game park wanted to progress into 3d but in the end, GPH won over with the proper cocktail of community, devs, and investors. mean-while game park ended up a creek with no investor interest in the XGP, and sank declaring bankruptcy in March of 2007 (or was it 2006?) either way, my prediction is with the pandora coming out, GPH will be soon follow its mother company. (another result of your research would also be this thread not existing)

 

[hal9000]

- Amiga CD32
This is just an Amiga 500 with a cd drive. If you hook a cd-rom to an amiga 500 you can play the games. There is some piece of software you need, I forget what it's called.

This is actually an Amiga 1200 with a CD drive, not an A500 (68020, better graphic chipset). And the A1200 is a great machine that is not emulated on the GP2X. A500 emulation on GP2X is not perfect anyway (and without keynoard, it is not that interesting...)

Having a fullspeed A1200 emulation working on Pandora could be the main reason for me to buy it. There is still a significant number of Amiga fans around here, I think.

By the way, could you please avoid adding your comments inside the quotations? This is quite disturbing, I believed Exophase was making this statement. If you want to insert your comment between your quotations, you can just use a closing "quote" tag, then write your comment, then write another opening "quote" tag.

 

[Pickle]

Squidge, are you implying here that GP2X apps will run on Pandora without a recompile? Very interesting if so.

Yes.


Is that entirely true? Wouldnt low level things need to be changed?
For example most games use SDL, so if SDL is statically compiled for the GP2X, would it still work? I would think it needs to be modifed for Pandora's hw. If SDL does it would force a full recompile of the app with the new lib.
If it was dynamically linked, then only SDL would need to be rewritten, and then that case I agree the app wouldnt need to be recomplied.
Even for apps that dont use SDL and use some sort of minimal lib, it would need be rewrttien for the new hw?

Now if we are talking about programs or libs that dont use specific hw, then I would agree no reompile is nessecary.