My Thoughts on the Pyra

[WizardStan]

They are additional but not directly accessible general purpose CPUs with DSP instructions. With regular cores you just create a new thread and the OS can take advantage of additional cores automatically. With these you need to write code specifically for them and do something that I don't even know what to get them to run that code.

I've written code for M4s before, it should be easier to use them than the Pandora's DSP, but I'm not certain how much easier. Could be much easier, could be only slightly. At the very least you don't need some fancy SDKs or IDEs to compile for it, just a gcc cross compiler will do.

 

[deadofmind]

The M4s are part of the main processor chip? Or are they a separate chip on the SoC that we could maybe go without having installed?

 

[WizardStan]

They're part of the SoC.

You wouldn't save much by cutting them out anyway, the entire SoC only costs $10.

 

[rygD]

Watch this video.

OMAP 5 is mind blowing.

It make you to the coolest person on earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=lynSWIFOcRE

"Simultaneous multiple OSes" around 2:25 grabbed my attention.  I wonder what is required to get Pyra doing this.

His controlling using gestures has me rethinking my opinion of cameras in mobile devices.  I still don't like them, but this video shows how they can be useful.  Also, the "Augmented reality 3D gaming" casino thing at the end is kinda cool.  VTC is useful, even if I personally dislike it.

Cool.    So in short, The OMAP5 can do everything. Do we also get such an Projector for the Pyra? "Pyra-Projector"?

Yeah, we need a projector dock thing.

 

[deadofmind]

They're part of the SoC.


You wouldn't save much by cutting them out anyway, the entire SoC only costs $10.

I wasn't thinking about price. Mainly just space saving techniques for the SoC daughter-board. But I'm sure they have all the spacing and stuff figured out

 

[levi]

Watch this video.


OMAP 5 is mind blowing.


It make you to the coolest person on earth.


[snip]

"Simultaneous multiple OSes" around 2:25 grabbed my attention. I wonder what is required to get Pyra doing this.

His controlling using gestures has me rethinking my opinion of cameras in mobile devices. I still don't like them, but this video shows how they can be useful. Also, the "Augmented reality 3D gaming" casino thing at the end is kinda cool. VTC is useful, even if I personally dislike it.

Except it pulls tricks like showing 3D with the 3D object overlapping the border of the screen, which it just plain can't do for the forseeable future. Only the gesture recognition to stop the alarm is novel, although only because I always forget if left button is snooze and right one cancel or the other way round in my half-awake fug when I use my own phone to wake me up.

 

[rohezal]

Maybe there is a way to map playstation 2 Vector Units to the M4 cores. There are some multicore hacks for the PS2 emulators, maybe one A15 core can handle the cpu emulation, the A15 core other could handle the driver overhead and sound processing and the the m4 cores could handle the VU emulation. The VUs have 150 mhz and 40 KB cache http://www.philvaz.com/games/PS2.htm the M4 cores have 167 mhz and 32kb cache+64 kb ram.

I dont know how many 128 bit registers the M4 cores have and how much SIMD the m4 cores can do. But maybe they could help a bit.

Each VU has 32 128-bit registers and 32 32-bit registers.

http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Why-if-PS2-processor-is-300MHz-we-need-a-3-1-GHz-processor

 

[rygD]

Except it pulls tricks like showing 3D with the 3D object overlapping the border of the screen, which it just plain can't do for the forseeable future.

It probably can, they just aren't releasing stuff to do that.

Alternate stupid response:  What they don't show is that there really is no screen, just the projector.

Only the gesture recognition to stop the alarm is novel, although only because I always forget if left button is snooze and right one cancel or the other way round in my half-awake fug when I use my own phone to wake me up.

Yeah, I guess punching at something is easier than trying to hit snooze.  I felt the gestures might be useful if I was doing a presentation I could easily go to the next slide without anything else, or other things that might need to be done from across the room.

 

[levi]

Slightly more than an M4 core then. M4 seems to have a pretty standard register layout for an ARM device - 16 registers, two of which are reserved (PC and status) and two which are commonly used as the stack pointer and return address, leaving 13 general purpose 32-bit registers.


Edit: I've not seen any device that can bend light to make it appear to come from where there is no light source, except for a mirror or a lens, and then you physically need the lens or mirror where you're looking. Fancy glasses could use a variety of tricks to get round that limitation, but I can't see how anything glasses-free can pull off such magic.

 

[WizardStan]

Except it pulls tricks like showing 3D with the 3D object overlapping the border of the screen

It's not supposed to imply that it is literally overlapping like that, they aren't saying that it will literally be like that.It's a trick of marketing to emphasize the image is 3D, not holographic or anything like that. It's the same type of parallax technology as in the 3DS.

 

[rygD]

So Pyra will have a holographic display.    I expect sales to be amazing.

 

[levi]

Except it pulls tricks like showing 3D with the 3D object overlapping the border of the screen

It's not supposed to imply that it is literally overlapping like that, they aren't saying that it will literally be like that.
It's a trick of marketing to emphasize the image is 3D, not holographic or anything like that. It's the same type of parallax technology as in the 3DS.

Yes, I appreciate that. But it's the sort of marketing trick that annoys me, and I suspect wows a lot of people watching that vid. If Apple can't show the iPhone loading things quicker than it really does in an advert, this sort of thing shouldn't be allowed either (except the broadcasting authority has no jurisdiction over youtube videos).