Here's hoping for 2GB ram not 1GB....


Ill never get 2Gb full. Can i get one with less ram?
 
Ram is cheap nowadays, on a device that is more expensive than the ram to begin with i'd rather have in abundance.

While saturating 2GB may be difficult on a regular basis, thats a good idea to target as a main spec.

More ram could be used for virtualization, or loading the whole OS into ram.

With 4 chips @ 8 gigabyte density each, thats 4GB.
 
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DIMMs? Even a SO-DIMM module is going to be around the same size as the whole board the RAM+CPU is soldered to, so I can't see anyone fitting four of them in a Pyra.
 
I'm led to believe that that board is just the one used to interface the peripheral (main) board to the OMAP dev board, not the final CPU board. That said, I don't know what all those unpopulated chips would be for in that case.
 
ARM is generally less of a RAM hog. Additionally, the available Thumb2 instruction set is able to make code about 30% smaller than using common ARM instructions.
Code is not a RAM hog for a long time already for any device without severe memory constraints, data is. No architecture can decrease the size of an image, audio or video.

We'll probably start with the 2GB RAM and it seems we could go up to 8GB with our current setup.
So there is something like PAE in ARM world, interesting.

2GB should be enough for any content consumption, even with Android as the main system.

4GB is the maximal amount of memory if one wants one 32 bit program to use all memory it can. The remaining RAM could be divided between video and background programs so that the system would stay responsible.

8GB can only be used with several memory hungry programs running at once (or ramdisk). Very few people would need it.

My killer app is octave so i'd prefer a 4gb version.
 
I'm led to believe that that board is just the one used to interface the peripheral (main) board to the OMAP dev board, not the final CPU board. That said, I don't know what all those unpopulated chips would be for in that case.
It's the actual CPU board.

It still has to be cut off the main board.
 
for me, at least 2GB, more the better. there is basically no upgrading this (you would have to wait for a new CPU card to be designed)  and the SD card storage means when you are low on memory the system swap partition will not help you much since its slow (and there is the question whether you are putting too much strain on the card), and on the other hand if you have extra memory if available linux will use it too hide some of the slowness of the IO, it would also allow better for running GNOME and KDE, you will be able to run more programs, load more data etcetc...
 
The OMAP 5 Devboard has 2GB of RAM, I suspect the Pyra will have at least that.  Honestly still haven't found an application that needed more than 750MBs.
Bill Gates said too:

No Human need ever more than 640b KB Ram in his Personal Computer.
^_^

Wait when we emulating different OS/Games with Qemu in the next Stage ^_^

Maybe we want to make a Ramdrive too for speeding up some Things :rolleyes:

(woah an Idea ist to run some PNDs in a Ramdrive too for unbelievible loading Speeds)
 
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No architecture can decrease the size of an image, audio or video.
My company actually almost cut our RAM usage in half by switching to fp16 for most of our data floating point data, something that's only natively supported on ARM. Also you have to not care about precision that much. So yes, you are literally correct that the architecture can't decrease the size of an image, audio, or video, there is at least one thing that a specific architecture (ie, ARM) can do to improve RAM usage.
 
We'll probably start with the 2GB RAM and it seems we could go up to 8GB with our current setup.
2 GB sounds good to me for personal anticipated use.

However it would be good to know the cost & battery use implications for 2GB, 4GB & 8GB so intelligent suggestions can be made.

If 4GB rather than 2GB proved to be a small increase in cost / battery use then I can see the logic of going with 4GB for things like desktop replacement use / Ramdrive / Virtual Machines etc.

Could the Pyra even use 8GB?
 
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Bill Gates said too:

No Human need ever more than 640b KB Ram in his Personal Computer.
No he didn't. I don't think anyone remembers the exact quote, but there was never an "ever" attached to it, and it was very context specific: you have to be aware of what was going on at the time to appreciate why that number is significant and that it was actually a very good thing.This is going back a long time ago to when IBM engineers were designing the first PC. The 8086 CPU only had 1MB of address space. Some of that address space had to be dedicated to peripherals so that the CPU could talk to the rest of the system, things like the video and audio systems, etc... Whatever was left over was dedicated to RAM. The IBM engineers wanted an even split: 512KB for system, 512KB for RAM. At the time they were expecting most users to need 128KB of RAM or less, so an even split was more than generous. Bill Gates actually stepped up and said no, 128KB was not enough, 512KB was not enough: 640KB should be enough. 384KB would be dedicated to system peripherals while up to 640KB would be allowed for RAM.

He didn't say "640KB would be enough" as if no one would never use more, he said 640KB would be enough as a push to get MORE than what the engineers were going to give us. Bill Gates gets a lot of flak for a lot of good reasons but this is not one of them: for this at least he should be applauded.
 
Jeeze even *I* think 8gb is too much! on my laptop even doing raytracing, training ANN's, any range of stuff and I've been lucky to reach 3/4 of that and that's with a i5 on a 64bit OS!
 
Just thought I'd check my memory usage right now, don't have much open (often there will also be Unity + Maya + Mudbox open) but right now I'm at 14.4 GB.

502vps.jpg


I'm not saying the Pyra needs anywhere need that much, but on every Windows computer I have ever owned, having 'too much' RAM has never been an issue. My current box has 32 GB in, and I'm often using over 16 GB (but less than 32 GB) so I seem to have about the right amount for my current usage.

Edit: in the above you can see: computer browser windows, chrome, skype, notepad++, command terminal, Tortoise HG, emClient (email), Visual Studio 2012, Photoshop, Eclipse, Calculator, Postbox (email archive), task manager and mspaint (the last two for making this screenshot). 
 
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Windows is a memory hog. I'm not sure I often make it over 4GB in my linux installation (Lubuntu). But I also don't run very intensive tasks much...
 
Bill Gates said too:

No Human need ever more than 640b KB Ram in his Personal Computer.
Like WizardStan already explained, Bill gates never has said that. It's one of these famous misquotes in history. ;)

Windows is a memory hog. I'm not sure I often make it over 4GB in my linux installation (Lubuntu). But I also don't run very intensive tasks much...
I have Vista with 4GB RAM in my PC and it behaves fine (after some heavy tuning of course). 2Gb should be more than enough for the Pyra, thats alot for such a tiny mobile device I guess. Not sure how the power consumption really will be but more RAM usualy means more power drainage. And if 2GB drain much more power than 1GB I eve nwould like to be happy with 1GB RAM, which then would also make the Pyra cheaper. :)
 
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