My Mp Pandora

[skyeyemachine]

Aw, dang, I was hoping for Majora's Mask as well. Hopefully the emulation gurus can work enough of their magic to bring that one up to full speed...but I can settle for Ocarina of Time in the interim.

(Indeed, I suppose I'll have to! :lol: )

Majora's Mask works, though it uses around 80% of the CPU time without graphics rendering. So either you need to put up with a lot of dropped frames, or overclock, or both.

If you do want to try it, make sure to use the 20091217 version, as earlier versions had a bug that would cause it to crash occasionally.

Mm, thanks for the tip. I may just stick with running it on a PC though; there's plenty of other applications I'll be using on the Pandora that aren't nearly as processor-intensive. Speaking for myself, I haven't the first clue about overclocking, and the last thing I'd want to do is overload my nice new device.

 

[second exodous]

The internal NAND isn't anywhere near as fragile as people make it sound - it just makes sense to treat it carefully since it's not an easily replaceable part.

And as Wheels mentions above - NAND is also the storage in SD cards. It's a bit pointless trying to make generalisations between the speed of NAND and the speed of an SD card without actual hard benchmarks on the platform, as everything depends on the speed of the specific NAND chips used, and the speed of the SD bus hardware.

The B&N [rul=http://nookdevs.com/Teardown#Teardown_Photos]Nook[/url] doesn't even have NAND, it just has a replaceable micro SD card. Might be a good thing to do for future revisions/versions of the Pandora, get rid of the NAND and put a micro SD slot on the board. This way you never have to worry about it wearing out as you can replace it if it does.

I think you're correct though, I have a gig SD card that I've written and deleted what seems like 100's of times and still works. Having the internal storage replaceable in future Pandoras would be great though. Also, it could come with a gig or whatever but the users could put 16GB in there if they wanted. How much would this raise the price of a final unit? I know it's too late to do now but for future versions, perhaps the Pandora2?

 

[MWeston]

Might be a good thing to do for future revisions/versions of the Pandora, get rid of the NAND and put a micro SD slot on the board. This way you never have to worry about it wearing out as you can replace it if it does.

Pandora has that functionality right now basically. We just put the second slot on the outside so the user can change the card. If you want to, you don't ever have to use the NAND, just erase it and always run from SD1. The NAND is nice because you know the board will always boot up and you don't lose a card slot. Why would you want to intentionally force people to have one less slot?

There are only three MMC (SD/SDIO) controllers on OMAP3. As used on Pandora: SD1, SD2 and Wifi.

 

[marshal]

Does this mean than the SD card and wifi share the same bandwidth ? Not that it worries me or anything, just asking...

 

[craigix]

There was going to be another video tonight until I smashed my head off an open window and, well, there was blood everywhere, a lovely trail to the bathroom.

Whoops.

Sitting with a towel and ice on my head and taking pain killers.

 

[MWeston]

I'm not sure how I could have made that any more clear.

"There are only three MMC (SD/SDIO) controllers on OMAP3. As used on Pandora: SD1, SD2 and Wifi."

They are obviously separate other than the CPU that drives them. Perhaps you thought it was like an SPI setup with shared lines and separate chip selecting, but it's not. Each one is separate and might even have its own DMA control.

 

[Alec]

There was going to be another video tonight until I smashed my head off an open window and, well, there was blood everywhere, a lovely trail to the bathroom.

Whoops.

Sitting with a towel and ice on my head and taking pain killers.

Oh Craig...

 

[MWeston]

There was going to be another video tonight until I smashed my head off an open window and, well, there was blood everywhere, a lovely trail to the bathroom.

Stay off the roof! It's winter ffs.

 

[gruso]

"Get off the dang roof!"

 

[WizardStan]

I'm not sure how I could have made that any more clear.

"There are only three MMC (SD/SDIO) controllers on OMAP3. As used on Pandora: SD1, SD2 and Wifi."

They are obviously separate other than the CPU that drives them. Perhaps you thought it was like an SPI setup with shared lines and separate chip selecting, but it's not. Each one is separate and might even have its own DMA control.

Someone else found the quote, but it said there was a combined bandwidth of 24 MB/s (or something to that affect) across the two SD cards. I think information creep is happening again, and people are assuming too much.

edit: by "it said", I mean "you said". It was a MWeston brand quote, for sure

edit the second: This one:

With a theoretical max of 24MB/s, these are pretty decent results for real data.

If that 24MB/s is individually, then there's no problems, but if that's the max across the entire bus, then heavy reads or writes could cut into the Wifi, or vice versa.

 

[Mr.Confuzed]

There was going to be another video tonight until I smashed my head off an open window and, well, there was blood everywhere, a lovely trail to the bathroom.

Nothing wrong with a little schadenfreude in your videos.

 

[Exophase]

That's one of the reasons that NAND Flash won out over the earlier NOR Flash for most things, but the fact is that NAND Flash is also what's inside SD cards, CompactFlash, etc. Almost all the Flash devices you see around (and plenty you don't think about) are NAND these days. But of course, not all NAND chips are created equally, and some are faster than others, especially with good controllers. If the onboard NAND in the Pandora is slower than your average SD card, it may have to do with the cost of the NAND chips (and the chips that go with them) between the two. Cheaper is usually slower.

Would be quite strange if the onboard NAND was slower, since it's going through a bus that's 4 times wider and over 3 times faster and not through SD controllers. Not saying you're wrong, of course.. just it'd have to be some pretty inherently slow NAND. The thing about the NAND is it's paired with the DDR SDRAM, literally on the same package. So while they are getting a good deal, I would personally hold the NAND to the same quality standards as the RAM. And I'd like to tell you more but you have to register to get the data sheet and I'm not in a very good state of mind for it right now

 

[MWeston]

That was a statement about each card. 48MHz clock and 4-bit transfers equals 24MB/s but of course real throughput would never be that high due to commands and bus arbitration. Someone in the Beagle chat room said they got about 15MB/s with a high class SD card.

I'm not aware of any bandwidth sharing between the cards but someone could look to the TRM for the information if they really wanted to know.

 

[skyeyemachine]

There was going to be another video tonight until I smashed my head off an open window and, well, there was blood everywhere, a lovely trail to the bathroom.

Whoops.

Sitting with a towel and ice on my head and taking pain killers.

NO EXCUSEno, seriously, I hope that heals up okay, Craig. Smashing your head open is never a fun experience.

On the other hand, you can now officially endorse the Pandora as a machine that significant amounts of blood went into the making of.

No doubt most of the forum crew can supply some tears, and together, you've got an adage!

 

[second exodous]

Might be a good thing to do for future revisions/versions of the Pandora, get rid of the NAND and put a micro SD slot on the board. This way you never have to worry about it wearing out as you can replace it if it does.

Pandora has that functionality right now basically. We just put the second slot on the outside so the user can change the card. If you want to, you don't ever have to use the NAND, just erase it and always run from SD1. The NAND is nice because you know the board will always boot up and you don't lose a card slot. Why would you want to intentionally force people to have one less slot?

There are only three MMC (SD/SDIO) controllers on OMAP3. As used on Pandora: SD1, SD2 and Wifi.

I'm not sure how I could have made that any more clear.

"There are only three MMC (SD/SDIO) controllers on OMAP3. As used on Pandora: SD1, SD2 and Wifi."

They are obviously separate other than the CPU that drives them. Perhaps you thought it was like an SPI setup with shared lines and separate chip selecting, but it's not. Each one is separate and might even have its own DMA control.

Sorry, didn't see you're posts before, this thread is 35 pages.

I still think it would be a cool idea to replace the NAND with a micro SD, then you guys could go cheap with a card with a few gigs and users could splurge on a larger card if they wanted. It would kinda be like having 3 SD slots rather than two, just one would be under the battery. Craig said the Pandora2 will most likely use OMAP4 so maybe OMAP4 can support more than 3 MMC (SD/SDIO) controllers. I obviously don't know as much as you so if it's impossible or a stupid idea just ignore me.

 

[MDave]

Sorry, didn't see you're posts before, this thread is 35 pages.

I still think it would be a cool idea to replace the NAND with a micro SD, then you guys could go cheap with a card with a few gigs and users could splurge on a larger card if they wanted. It would kinda be like having 3 SD slots rather than two, just one would be under the battery. Craig said the Pandora2 will most likely use OMAP4 so maybe OMAP4 can support more than 3 MMC (SD/SDIO) controllers. I obviously don't know as much as you so if it's impossible or a stupid idea just ignore me.

I don't think it's a matter of being able to use something else instead of the NAND, because the NAND is AFAIK, part of the package that the OMAP is. It's basically on the same block of chip as the processor, ram, etc.

 

[WizardStan]

I still think it would be a cool idea to replace the NAND with a micro SD, then you guys could go cheap with a card with a few gigs and users could splurge on a larger card if they wanted. It would kinda be like having 3 SD slots rather than two, just one would be under the battery. Craig said the Pandora2 will most likely use OMAP4 so maybe OMAP4 can support more than 3 MMC (SD/SDIO) controllers. I obviously don't know as much as you so if it's impossible or a stupid idea just ignore me.

Having a 3rd micro SD card may be a cool idea, but not as a replacement for the NAND, I should think. It doesn't make any sense to me.

 

[second exodous]

Sorry, didn't see you're posts before, this thread is 35 pages.

I still think it would be a cool idea to replace the NAND with a micro SD, then you guys could go cheap with a card with a few gigs and users could splurge on a larger card if they wanted. It would kinda be like having 3 SD slots rather than two, just one would be under the battery. Craig said the Pandora2 will most likely use OMAP4 so maybe OMAP4 can support more than 3 MMC (SD/SDIO) controllers. I obviously don't know as much as you so if it's impossible or a stupid idea just ignore me.

I don't think it's a matter of being able to use something else instead of the NAND, because the NAND is AFAIK, part of the package that the OMAP is. It's basically on the same block of chip as the processor, ram, etc.

Oh, ok, I didn't know. The nook uses ARM but not the same chip, I didn't know on the OMAP3 the NAND was tied directly to the chip. Like I said I didn't know.

 

[moxie]

There was going to be another video tonight until I smashed my head off an open window and, well, there was blood everywhere, a lovely trail to the bathroom.

A pal of mine were going to get movie tickets for Terminator 2 (yes, this is one of those stories from the prehistoric days when dinosaurs walked the earth). Lovely hot summer day, strolls around town, looks at girls, happens to bump into a marquee but thinks not much of it...anyways, after a while he gets to the ticket window and asks for two tickets for T2.

The girl inside just stares at him, open mouth.

My friend is a little nonplussed over this, so he repeats his question.

"Have you...looked yourself in the mirror recently?", the girl asks.

"Uhm...no?"

"Well, then, perhaps you should..."

So my pal strolls of to the bathrooms, slightly confused, looks in the mirror...and sees something that looks like it came straight out of evil dead or something. Apparently he had cut his head open on the marquee, and his hair and the side of his face was just soaked in blood. It had run down his neck and made a big stain on the front of his tee. He'd noticed that something was a bit wet, but hey, everyone gets a little sweaty in a hot summer day...

 

[notaz]

I still think it would be a cool idea to replace the NAND with a micro SD

SD needs a SD host controller to work, you can't just connect it in place of NAND, and all 3 SD controllers are already in use on pandora.