I'm worried about the Pyra's market performance.

[Kelvin]

@ Kelvin : Play the long game, don't forget that the plan is to be able to upgrade the CPU board on the Pyra relatively cheaply, so after a couple of upgrades you'll be saving money.

Also consider the added value of this community, and the excellent customer service from ED if you need spares or repairs.

Yeah, I suppose so. Alright, I'll stick with the Pyra.

 

[Kev2442]

I too feel it is quite expensive. But it is the only device able to cater to my needs :

- I've got two 5-10 years old laptops, one Debian-driven in my travel bag to surf the net and watch videos (in 480p...) and a bit of emulation, and the other a WinXP-based high-perf antique I'm messing around with in order to play PC games on... mostly without net access of course. The Pyra would allow me to have a capable net/emulation laptop fitting in my murse/satchel/whatever you call it. Plus gaming controls. Never forget the gaming controls.

- My smartphone is antique by today's standards. It's an old Samsung Wave II running Bada, with a display often on the verge of collapsing and quite frequent crash-and-reboots. If I could replace it with something better suited to gaming on-the-go and capable of HD streaming, that would be great.

- I also have a high-spec desktop PC, and I'm totally sticking with it. But I really like the principle of upgrading only what must be, and keep the rest for as long as you see fits. Upgrading only the CPU board would do just that. I don't want your dispensable QHD screen (I've got one at home, thanks) or your new glossy fingerprint-covered case, thank you. What I want is a quality device with up-to-standards performance.

- As said already, most people around us don't care about personal privacy. I do. Not because I'm an undercover agent or conceiving highly traded goods with many patents at stake, just because I don't want anyone to know something that I didn't tell myself or entrusted someone to repeat. I like to have control over both my private and public life, and you can't do so with your average smartphone. I'm sticking with Win10, which is bad enough to me, even if I disabled most data collectors.

So that makes four selling points for the Pyra, and I don't know of any that can do as well in these departments. Most of the times, you pay just as much for only one or two of these pros. But for that, I'm both betting on calling and SMS capability and future board upgrades. But even now, I'm fully satisfied with 720p streaming (the Pyra can't display more anyway) and pre-2000 emulation. Anything better would just be a bonus to me.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Yeah, I suppose so. Alright, I'll stick with the Pyra.

I do sincerely hope you like it! I can scarcely wait for mine.

 

[Ian J]

Sure the standard version without extra ram is about 200$ cheaper, but still much higher than GPD Win's.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, what you're paying for is a device that will last you many many years longer than any Chinese device.

Most similar items are superseded within a year and then you are left with outdated technology and no new firmware or software as everyone has moved onto the latest device (including the manufacturers)

The Pandora was released in 2010 and still gets firmware updates, new software is still regularly released and devices are still being repaired by ED.

Show me any device that old that has that kind of support.

 

[vcoleiro1]

Comparing a Pyra with a GPD Win is like comparing a car to a bicycle. I own a GPD Win, it is sitting on the shelf for days in a row because it just does not deliver what it promised.

The hardware is lackluster, the keyboard is downright unusable. The design is shoddy, in daily use it shows how the OS is forcibly shoehorned into components that were never designed for it. The support is laughable, reddit and facebook groups are places for amateurs to experiment and guess, without much guidance from the designers. Expandability (apart from SD cards, which have frequent read/write issues) is nil.

Using it as a portable gaming machine (the very thing it was geared towards) requires a lot of patience and a high frustration threshold. Resolving issues is guesswork and rather resemblems alchemy than analysis.

If you want a device that keeps you occupied and makes you wonder how quick design can churn out something, it's the thing for you. I want something that works, that is designed well, that will keep working for a couple of years. The higher price justifies that in any way. Feel free to copy this into all the reddit boards you know.

I'm going to sell te GPD Win again. You want it? Don't complain.

Apart from the keyboard that could be better, I couldn't disagree more. The HW is awesome and the games it can play more than surpass what I thought it would be capable of.

The GPD WIN, is probably the most awesome handheld I've ever owned

 

[sulu]

most people around us don't care about personal privacy. I do.
[..]
I'm sticking with Win10

Now that is a very "interesting" statement!

 

[Faust]

Apart from the keyboard that could be better, I couldn't disagree more. The HW is awesome and the games it can play more than surpass what I thought it would be capable of.

The GPD WIN, is probably the most awesome handheld I've ever owned

Yes, Somemore GPD is working on Linux for the Pocket (so for the Win too).

@Kelvin

The next revision of GPD Win is getting the Atom 8750 instead of the 8700.

Honestly the Win is great device, and if you want to stick with a x64 capable gaming device, it's neither the Pyra (that unfortunately seems to shut down after 5 minutes on full throttle - 1.5GhZ) neither the Pocket (that have 8gb of ram but bigger screen and bigger screen resolution) but the Win that you need.

From the beginning I preordered the Pyra (number 120) after several months of thinking, investigation, and especially the big changes that happened to the Win (fan + processor upgrade + bigger battery) I ended up by founding someone to buy my preorder because I didn't want to fail on ED so easily asking for a refund, I wanted someone to enjoy something I couldn't handle much (I never used Linux, I'm playing Windows games, and I don't have the 500€+ to add for the version I wanted) so I bought the GPD WIN, and I really love it.

Everything is not perfect and you really need to customise it by yourself to make it fit your own taste.

When I started to do so I really liked it because I made something unique and every small things can change the overall experience, it doesn't exist a GPD Win like mine.

@Kev2442

This statement isn't true but after checking the Pyra web browser question section, it seems that the privacy everyone expecting on the Pyra won't come from the web browser software unfortunately.

 

[spud42]

@ sulu , taking select statements or partial statements out of context is misleading. something the mainstream media excels at.
you can make it appear that someone said the opposite of what they actually said.

 

[sulu]

@ sulu , taking select statements or partial statements out of context is misleading.

That's why I added a smilie to my last post.
And btw., I don't think it's out of context. If someone states how much he cares about his personal privacy and then goes on to say that he's using Win10, then something is wrong imho.

something the mainstream media excels at.
you can make it appear that someone said the opposite of what they actually said.

Humans in general excel at that. That includes you, me, the mainstream media and especially those who accuse others of doing that while claiming for themselves, to only present "alternative facts".

 

[TrashyMG]

it's neither the Pyra (that unfortunately seems to shut down after 5 minutes on full throttle - 1.5GhZ)

If that was the case my OMAP5 Devboard would be totally useless, I've done some heavy compiling, tons of heavy x86 emulation and bogged down the CPUs with extremely heavy web browsing, I've done some heavy work with it over the years I've had this devboad and never caused the processor to need to shutdown due to thermal overload.

First of all hns said he didn't have a cooling solution in place, like dumping the heat to the PCB like intended. Also I don't think that NEON stress is working as intended as Notaz pointed out in a later post. I think it's stressing his processor well beyond what is normally expected under a full load. I could be wrong about Notaz's comment, but still hns is running the OMAP5 without a cooling solution.

 

[vcoleiro1]

How long has the Pandora 2/Pyra project been going on for?

I can't seem to find a complete timeline. It's been more than 3 years , and that's just it's incarnation being known as the Pyra. I know we used to refer to it as the Pandora 2 before that.

 

[TrashyMG]

How long has the Pandora 2/Pyra project been going on for?

I can't seem to find a complete timeline. It's been more than 3 years , and that's just it's incarnation being known as the Pyra. I know we used to refer to it as the Pandora 2 before that.

Feb 4th 2014 is the date I ordered the OMAP5 devboard, I picked it up the day EvilDragon confirmed the OMAP5 is going to be the processor of choice. I think there was a years of discussions on what the next handheld would be. I think internally the idea has been going on for many years earlier.

 

[Faust]

If that was the case my OMAP5 Devboard would be totally useless, I've done some heavy compiling, tons of heavy x86 emulation and bogged down the CPUs with extremely heavy web browsing, I've done some heavy work with it over the years I've had this devboad and never caused the processor to need to shutdown due to thermal overload.

First of all hns said he didn't have a cooling solution in place, like dumping the heat to the PCB like intended. Also I don't think that NEON stress is working as intended as Notaz pointed out in a later post. I think it's stressing his processor well beyond what is normally expected under a full load. I could be wrong about Notaz's comment, but still hns is running the OMAP5 without a cooling solution.

Oh then it's a different story. But I'm still afraid about the overclocking, will the Pyra be able to overclock to 1.7GhZ like the three Pandora was able to overclock 200MhZ more?

 

[levi]

It's already been shown to be quite stable at 1.7GHz. Unfortunately without a cooling solution, or a good scale-back solution, it shuts down rather quickly.

 

[TrashyMG]

like the three Pandora was able to overclock 200MhZ more?

Well the Fastest a Pandora could overclock is 1.3Ghz on a 1Ghz Pandora, not everyone could do that stable, mine started to get unstable around 1265MHz... But you can't just compare clock speed. The OMAP5 in the Pyra running at 500MHz has considerable better performance than the Pandora Overclocked at 1.3GHz, not only because it's dual-core, but because the A15 is inherently better.

 

[Kev2442]

@sulu : I know it doesn't seem right. But I'm kind of a candidate to the Linux Worst Case award : I'm using proprietary drivers for recent or professionnal hardware, using Windows-only software that I'm not always able to replace, and as it is my main computer, I don't really have the time to tinker with Linux when I want it to "just work".

Trust me, I tried Linux on it for a few days (Linux Mint and AV Linux mainly), but I can't take the learning curve on my everyday PC. That is one of the reasons I'm going for the Pyra : it will complete my use of Debian in a more advanced way, and the community will be able to help me if I need them.

I don't want to switch for MacOS for all the reasons in the world, so I'm stuck with Windows. And now that 7 and 8 got the same spyware as 10, there isn't much of a difference left. So I'm running the tools made by the community to shut down the data collectors, and I'm getting what I need. I know it ain't perfect, but still better than self compiling NVIDIA drivers and messing with JACK in order to get signal from my mixing table. And I'm not even talking about gaming.

I think sometime I'll successfully run Windows in a Linux environment to get the best of both worlds, but for now I can't make Linux-savviness my priority. And I don't think starting with Ubuntu is a solution either.

 

[levi]

The OMAP5 in the Pyra running at 500MHz has considerable better performance than the Pandora Overclocked at 1.3GHz, not only because it's dual-core, but because the A15 is inherently better.

That seems a bold claim. I guess you're proposing that because it's got two cores it's twice as powerful, as according to wikipedia in terms of dhrystone mips it's only almost twice as fast at the same clock speed per core. But for pure 32-bit ARM or 16-bit thumb code, I suspect it'll be a lot less than that - it only benefits from out of order execution across double the execution paths per core.

I guess it all depends what you are trying to do. Anything needing to work with bunches of 128-bit numbers will benefit from the new 128-bit NEON registers, which I guess could apply to 3d worlds quite well, but well optimised 32-bit ARM or 16-bit Thumb code wouldn't run that much faster. Web browsers and so on will probably run much the same as the same clock speed, but I can see how the native handling of 128-bit values might help emulators of the Dreamcast and more recent hardware.

 

[TrashyMG]

That seems a bold claim.

It was purely on a benchmark where I forced the CPU to 500MHz and timed the amount of time it took to compile a fairly hefty sized program on both devices.

 

[levi]

In my experience, compilation of large programs is almost always bound by disc io (at least on older beefy x86 build servers), so I guess you were testing more the performance of the SD card and interface than the CPU, but I guess that's another point - with the extra RAM over the Pandora it'll be able to cache results and data a lot more effectively and not rely on writing out temp files quite as often.

I'm getting excited about the possibilities of this new hardware again - thanks for that!

 

[slaeshjag]

^ Where those build servers windows-based by any chance?

In my experience, windows has awful I/O performance, with large builds often taking an order of magnitude longer on the same disk/machine in windows as compared to linux.