Idea to maintain community after P2

[Exophase]

My mac has an aluminum body that acts as a heatsync for the processor. Is that an option? What if just the bottom plate was metal?

Using the housing to help with heat dissipation is an option that should be considered.. I can assure you that it's more than just the chassis acting as a heatsink for your Mac though..

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

...
My mac has an aluminum body that acts as a heatsync for the processor. Is that an option? What if just the bottom plate was metal?

Have you burned couple of hairs on your lap? 

 

[Grench]

Do fans work? It might be helpful to include a small fan

Fans are something you add on top of a heatsink. They add a lot of thickness, really undesirable for something like Pandora.


Heatsink doesn't have to imply any particular level of thickness, just some slab of metal that the SoC has a thermal path to.

I had a thought of how to handle additional thermal load in a Pandora sized clam shell device.  The idea is to get the heat out, without having it go through the user's hands.

Think about how we hold the Pandora - the front corners go to the palms, held from the side, with a finger (or two) on the back edge.  The only remaining (mostly) exposed edge without cables running into it is the front one.

This idea requires moving the SD slots to the -sides-.  Unless you're doing something with SDIO through one of the slots, it shouldn't matter.

OK, so, looking at layers in the existing Pandora bottom to top.

plastic

battery

chassis

motherboard (with heat generating features on the bottom, key presses on top)

keymat

key surround

That chassis layer of plastic - replace it with a sheet of ~20-16ga aluminum to act as a heat spreader/sink.  Feed that out the center 3/4 of the front edge - right where the SD slots are now.  Bond it to a ~10mm tall, ~80mm wide vertical finned aluminum radiator.  Alternatively, repeatedly fold the edge of the aluminum sheet to create a series of horizontal fins if it can meat the thermal needs - cheaper?

It should pull battery heat out (sits on top of battery), processor and system board heat out (a bit goofy pulling heat down, but through direct contact with the chips it should draw), etc...

The heat spreader/sink becomes the internal chassis - keeping weight down.  The plastic components screw into it.  Holes through it connect the battery.

It would actually function better on the back, but I think we all prefer the idea of cables connecting to that area instead.

 

[_jr_]

Whatever is in the running for Pandora 2 would probably need some sort of heatsink too.

Why? I thought there are solutions with larger processing power at lower power consumption. Just not as fast as the fastest. But I at least didn't buy a Pandora (in 2013) because of its speed. Battery life is much more important to me.

 

[Exophase]

Why? I thought there are solutions with larger processing power at lower power consumption. Just not as fast as the fastest. But I at least didn't buy a Pandora (in 2013) because of its speed. Battery life is much more important to me.

If you think that even a quad core 1.7GHz Cortex-A9 will use less power at peak than Pandora's 1GHz Cortex-A8 then I have some bad news for you. And that is far from the limits of what could be put on there. The cooling solution is about accommodating the peak output of the SoC. The dynamic range of power consumption on mobile hardware has changed a lot over the last few years. Idle consumption is a much lower. Light usage consumption is lower. Moderate consumption is similar. Peak consumption is a lot higher. You can have your great battery life doing Pandora-like tasks, and you can have the ability to do much more demanding tasks too - but you WILL pay for the latter. There isn't going to be a meaningful battery life figure, it's going to depend on you.

 

[Grench]

Does anyone else find it kind of tragic-funny that simply considering an X86 SoC is causing this type of 'The end is near!' stuff?

Really, all we're really doing is tossing around the idea as an option - to see if it is a feasible alternative to put in the mix with whatever other SoCs wind up being feasible - to then weigh the pros and cons.

This bit about, 'The community will be split!  Oh Nooos!' is more than a bit over of the top in melodrama isn't it?

It's akin to getting upset with your buddy for reading the menu at a new restaurant at the food court instead of walking right to, 'the usual place'.  Nobody has bought anything - it's just an examination of options.

So what's with the fear mongering?

 

[EssoAir]

Does anyone else find it kind of tragic-funny that simply considering an X86 SoC is causing this type of 'The end is near!' stuff?


Really, all we're really doing is tossing around the idea as an option - to see if it is a feasible alternative to put in the mix with whatever other SoCs wind up being feasible - to then weigh the pros and cons.


This bit about, 'The community will be split! Oh Nooos!' is more than a bit over of the top in melodrama isn't it?


It's akin to getting upset with your buddy for reading the menu at a new restaurant at the food court instead of walking right to, 'the usual place'. Nobody has bought anything - it's just an examination of options.


So what's with the fear mongering?

Because according to Linux_Swat im a bullshit kindergartener that constantly trolls and only attempts to shit all over the boards.

Its amazing the things you learn from professionals

 

[Exophase]

I forgot to respond to this earlier.. >_>

Worst case scenario, ED is really not beholden to sell as many of these as he gets orders. If he can't make 500,000 units or deal with 500,000 users then he doesn't have to fulfill 500,000 orders.

I do not understand why you are bringing this up, I can't connect this to anything that was said here before.

I think that's Craig you're talking about, pretty sure ED would sell all the units he got orders for He might stop taking orders if things got crazy of course.

ED actually said to me elsewhere, what if making Pandora 2 x86 attracts a ton of purchase orders? He expressed concern that he couldn't handle an operation dealing with an order of magnitude more manufacturing than he currently does. I said he can limit the scale to whatever he's comfortable with.. and he agreed with this.

This isn't some "Craig thing", it's not taking preorder money then not delivering. Nobody can take an unlimited number of orders, ever. Even Nintendo was capacity constrained with Wii for several months. For a long time Pandora was also capacity constrained. Right from the start they took on 4000 orders but there were far more than that who wanted to preorder. That was the limit they were comfortable with manufacturing (that they wouldn't be ready to make those 4000 any time soon is another matter).

Let's imagine that Pandora 2 did the exact same thing - 4000 units in the first batch. There isn't going to be an explosion of new users wanting to hack the device to use Windows, because those 4000 orders are going to be dominated by Pandora owners and people who have been following the project for what it is, not a ton of people who want to take a risk using it in some unconventional way. The problem pretty much needs the scale of sales to be a lot higher than it is in the first place, which is something that ED has to decide to scale up to. Makes more sense to worry about that happening first.

 

[Grench]

I forgot to respond to this earlier.. >_>

Worst case scenario, ED is really not beholden to sell as many of these as he gets orders. If he can't make 500,000 units or deal with 500,000 users then he doesn't have to fulfill 500,000 orders.

I do not understand why you are bringing this up, I can't connect this to anything that was said here before.

I think that's Craig you're talking about, pretty sure ED would sell all the units he got orders for He might stop taking orders if things got crazy of course.

ED actually said to me elsewhere, what if making Pandora 2 x86 attracts a ton of purchase orders? He expressed concern that he couldn't handle an operation dealing with an order of magnitude more manufacturing than he currently does. I said he can limit the scale to whatever he's comfortable with.. and he agreed with this.


This isn't some "Craig thing", it's not taking preorder money then not delivering. Nobody can take an unlimited number of orders, ever. Even Nintendo was capacity constrained with Wii for several months. For a long time Pandora was also capacity constrained. Right from the start they took on 4000 orders but there were far more than that who wanted to preorder. That was the limit they were comfortable with manufacturing (that they wouldn't be ready to make those 4000 any time soon is another matter).


Let's imagine that Pandora 2 did the exact same thing - 4000 units in the first batch. There isn't going to be an explosion of new users wanting to hack the device to use Windows, because those 4000 orders are going to be dominated by Pandora owners and people who have been following the project for what it is, not a ton of people who want to take a risk using it in some unconventional way. The problem pretty much needs the scale of sales to be a lot higher than it is in the first place, which is something that ED has to decide to scale up to. Makes more sense to worry about that happening first.

There is always the small supply high demand option of raising the price until they match.

Heck, if ED is going to avoid pre-orders on the successor product, put the first batch on an auction site selling one or two per day.  Let the market dictate the price until the madness subsides?

 

[_jr_]

Why? I thought there are solutions with larger processing power at lower power consumption. Just not as fast as the fastest. But I at least didn't buy a Pandora (in 2013) because of its speed. Battery life is much more important to me.

If you think that even a quad core 1.7GHz Cortex-A9 will use less power at peak than Pandora's 1GHz Cortex-A8 then I have some bad news for you. And that is far from the limits of what could be put on there. The cooling solution is about accommodating the peak output of the SoC. The dynamic range of power consumption on mobile hardware has changed a lot over the last few years. Idle consumption is a much lower. Light usage consumption is lower. Moderate consumption is similar. Peak consumption is a lot higher. You can have your great battery life doing Pandora-like tasks, and you can have the ability to do much more demanding tasks too - but you WILL pay for the latter. There isn't going to be a meaningful battery life figure, it's going to depend on you.

I admit I was thinking of something like a dual core A7. But seems I have to get that elsewhere.

 

[Exophase]

I admit I was thinking of something like a dual core A7. But seems I have to get that elsewhere.

So I guess you're saying that if it were an SoC that had both A15s and A7s on it that'd be no good for you? Or another CPU which offers comparable perf/W as A7s but higher peak perf, which is what Intel claims Silvermont accomplishes?

A7 sucks. A 1GHz A7 might perform similarly to Pandora's 1GHz A8 in "general purpose" tasks but in optimized NEON code it's nowhere close. It'd really suck if that's what we ended up with.

Either way, you probably won't get something like a Pandora elsewhere.

 

[ZXDunny]

There isn't going to be an explosion of new users wanting to hack the device to use Windows, because those 4000 orders are going to be dominated by Pandora owners and people who have been following the project for what it is, not a ton of people who want to take a risk using it in some unconventional way.

This. If the next Pandora is x86, I very much doubt I'll be installing windows on it - what would be the point? In fact, the only reason for x86 would be to run native WINE in a linux environment.

Why?

Very few (probably none) of the current devs would build for windows - they're all building in linux. I would suspect that at least at first the pandora-exclusive software released would be linux builds, as it would take time to attract new devs to the device who are orientated towards windows. By that point, most of the really good stuff (the game launchers, front ends etc) would all be linux based and thus windows wouldn't likely gain much traction.

Besides, although an x86 handheld would be lovely I think I'd personally be more interested in ARM simply because it's different. At the end of the day, all of my code recently will build for anything - so I have no real reason to prefer one over the other... but I just like the fact that Pandora is ARM for some reason.

D.

 

[thatgui]

I had a thought of how to handle additional thermal load in a Pandora sized clam shell device.  The idea is to get the heat out, without having it go through the user's hands.

.... 

That chassis layer of plastic - replace it with a sheet of ~20-16ga aluminum to act as a heat spreader/sink.  Feed that out the center 3/4 of the front edge - right where the SD slots are now.  Bond it to a ~10mm tall, ~80mm wide vertical finned aluminum radiator.  Alternatively, repeatedly fold the edge of the aluminum sheet to create a series of horizontal fins if it can meat the thermal needs - cheaper?

...

Would something like that pass electrical certification processes ? 

ED actually said to me elsewhere, what if making Pandora 2 x86 attracts a ton of purchase orders? He expressed concern that he couldn't handle an operation dealing with an order of magnitude more manufacturing than he currently does. I said he can limit the scale to whatever he's comfortable with.. and he agreed with this.

Now I see were this is coming from - but I'm (sorry for that) still not able to connect it to what was previously said, at least I can't find the post where someone suggested sales figures exceeding some thousands.

Why?

Why not ?
Maybe thats a "location based" - problem ? Back in the days when I finally got my Pandora I made a review about it on a electronic devices oriented forum I was frequenting at that time. I got quite a response to that review with most people asking, wether they could put Windows on it or not.

But I have no interest in advocating for putting Windows on a P2. My (baseless) fear of the community suffering from growth isn't Windows specific, I think this could happen with a ARM-P2 too.

 

[Exophase]

This. If the next Pandora is x86, I very much doubt I'll be installing windows on it - what would be the point? In fact, the only reason for x86 would be to run native WINE in a linux environment.

Why?

Very few (probably none) of the current devs would build for windows - they're all building in linux. I would suspect that at least at first the pandora-exclusive software released would be linux builds, as it would take time to attract new devs to the device who are orientated towards windows. By that point, most of the really good stuff (the game launchers, front ends etc) would all be linux based and thus windows wouldn't likely gain much traction.

Besides, although an x86 handheld would be lovely I think I'd personally be more interested in ARM simply because it's different. At the end of the day, all of my code recently will build for anything - so I have no real reason to prefer one over the other... but I just like the fact that Pandora is ARM for some reason.

D.

I think we can put this another way - if someone puts Windows on a Pandora then they do it to run some existing Windows thing. They'd do that and that'd be it. What is there to even really discuss, outside of a guide on how to do it and where to get drivers? Nothing that would really disrupt anything.

 

[WizardStan]

I'd just like to point out that the idea of being able to install alternate operating systems causing schism in the community can be debunked, right now, by the very fact that the P1 has multiple operating systems to choose from and no schism in sight. The simple fact that one of those operating systems might be Windows shouldn't alter the fact that multiple operating systems are already coexisting in harmony.

Furthermore, I don't know why y'all getting worked up about drivers and difficulty installing. The problem starts even before that: Windows' bootloader relies heavily on the bios and makes a lot of assumptions about the hardware it's running on, and even with an x86 SoC there's no guarantee the same functions will be available. Know how on desktop linux you have grub or lilo but on the Pandora we have something far more custom? They're open source boot loaders and we can't get them to run on the current Pandora, what hope would we have of getting the closed Windows boot loader to work? You couldn't just take a Windows CD and install it, even if everything device had perfect driver support. It wouldn't even be close to something average Joe could do. Hacking around what would be required goes beyond even building Slackware, or Android. If the P2 were to even have a chance to run Windows that's a decision that would need to be made from the very beginning, no doubt with added cost and sacrifice beyond choosing ARM vs x86.

 

[_wb_]

I have one of those Sony Vaio P series UMPCs - it was quite expensive (bought it in Japan for $800 or so, had to pay taxes when I brought it to Belgium so almost $1000 total price). It has an x86 cpu and came with Windows pre-installed. First thing I did with it was install GNU/Linux on it. I don't see why anyone would want to use Windows voluntarily.

Still, I barely use it nowadays, because its battery life is crap, and if you have to carry it with its power adapter, you can just as well take a laptop. With its 8" screen, it's too small to be used as a real laptop, and too big to be really more portable. The Pandora has a better form factor, even though it is a lot thicker and has an even smaller screen. Fitting in my pockets + great battery life are very important properties, it turns out.

Anyway, I'm digressing. My point is: there are people like me who just don't like Windows, so they will not spend time on figuring out ways to install Windows on a Pandora 2. Even if the Pandora 2 would come pre-shipped with Windows (a very unlikely scenario), they would try to get rid of it instead of starting to develop for Windows. I suspect many of the current Pandora devs and users have that opinion.

I also don't think that a handheld that can run Windows would attract so many new people, except maybe some people with false hopes and expectations. People who just want to play recent big studio games on the go without any troubles or tinkering are better off with some Nintendo or Sony handheld, or even an Android or iOS phone. People who want to do serious stuff are better off with GNU/Linux anyway. People who need Windows because they have to run some proprietary closed-source software that only works on Windows, will probably have a hard time using that software on a small screen. People who want to play the latest PC games end up with a GPU that is quite weak compared to those of real gaming PCs. In other words: Windows would only lead to trouble and disappointment, as usual.

 

[MrConfusion]

If the P2 were to even have a chance to run Windows that's a decision that would need to be made from the very beginning, no doubt with added cost and sacrifice beyond choosing ARM vs x86.

Exactly like this.

From purely Pandora point of view the bootstrap flash code doesn't need to be nearly as complex as Windows requires it to be. Or as big.

And in case people wanting Windows on P2 are still not convinced, maybe they should check this link below, because I just recalled there is a very recent example of an x86 device which was not a PC and it had exactly the same issues: the original XBox. MS probably didn't "cripple" it's ROM intentionally, they just put only the stuff that was neccessary there:

http://www.zdnet.com/hackers-make-xbox-into-a-windows-pc-3002123049/

I recall some time later it did become possible to boot Windows on the XBox natively by either hardware modding, or flashing the firmware (? might remember the later one wrong...).

I think if P2 went x86, then this approach (leave the gate theoretically open, but don't enable as such) would be best. Definitely would make it clear that "if you boot Windows, you're on your own" . Plus it's the cost conscious approach for the project...

 

[ekianjo]

Followig the NSA revelations the last thing i want on a mobile device is a windows OS.

 

[Klumpen]

You can install Windows on the current Pandora via QEMU or Wine, that's more than enough.

The OpenBrick2 will have more CPU power so this can be used more efficiently for Win98 retrogaming, maybe eben WinXP.

 

[EssoAir]

You can install Windows on the current Pandora via QEMU or Wine, that's more than enough.


The OpenBrick2 will have more CPU power so this can be used more efficiently for Win98 retrogaming, maybe eben WinXP.

I was personally hoping to have Win8 for all my school software. Schoolz require Mac OS X or Windows sine they are for some reason afraid of anything Linux (eslecially ARM)