No time for a break after GamesCom

[WizardStan]

First a Pyra with an upgraded cpu board (which can be sold already), then a mainboard that fully utilizes the new possibilities of the new SoC (faster USB, faster SD, maybe one or two cameras, etc).

Let's say you have a Pyra. On one bitter cold morning you use the Pyra to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him. On the follow through the CPU board is knocked loose and damaged. You now have a broken Pyra. You contact ED, explaining away the dark reddish stains as barbecue sauce, and install a shiny new CPU board. The repaired Pyra sits unmolested for a few weeks until one morning, you find in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug with a bulging egg sac on its tail. You grab your trusty Pyra and bludgeon the thing into mush but in the process you crack it, chipping a notch right in the middle of the keyboard. Of course, a cracked case means another trip to dragonbox.de. ED sells you a brand new case and mainboard. As soon as it arrives at your home and you complete the repairs, though, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He’s also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed trimmer line, and it’s wearing that unique expression of “you’re the man who killed me last winter” resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.
You brandish your Pyra. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, “That’s the same Pyra that slayed me!”

Is he right?

 

[klapse]

 Having only fullscreen 3d is not a 'small' downside (all sorts of desktop applications from office to multimedia are already using/starting to use 3D) and requiring all 3D using software to be adapted or even recompiled for Pyra would be a major downside.

Just curious, what office / multimedia apps require 3D accelerated graphics?  Seems really inappropriate to me.

 

[Grench]

In my opinion, the modular CPU thing will most likely not have much of an impact at all for end-users -- although I would of course love it if it would become an unexpected trend that SoC vendors would start making their future devboards also available in the form of a Pyra CPU module.

Most likely, it just means that ED can design the successor to the Pyra in a cheaper/faster/easier way, by doing it in two steps. First a Pyra with an upgraded cpu board (which can be sold already), then a mainboard that fully utilizes the new possibilities of the new SoC (faster USB, faster SD, maybe one or two cameras, etc).

Mmm...  I suspect that this has a lot more to do with division of issues during development on a single console than it does with any upgrade potential.

The last I saw, the SoC board is a complex 7 layer animal.  Just getting the right pin to the right connector/trace on the daughter board is a challenge in itself with potential for error.

The main board has fewer layers, but is highly complex in the connector length and how it terminates - there is even a wonky chip as a result of how much was crammed in.

By separating the two boards, development time should have been decreased as it should have been easier to pinpoint where issues are and cheaper to generate a fixed version for testing.  I'm betting it will result in slightly greater expenses during production due to having 2 physical boards to deal with - but that's likely an acceptable trade off.

Sure, I'd love to see someone take the current or next generation of the Intel tablet SoC and adapt it out on a daughter board for the Pyra, but I seriously doubt it will happen.  The Pyra would have to sell into the hundreds of thousands of units before someone would be likely to take up making replacement SoC boards for it.

 

[notaz]

How much slower is a more standard setup? And why? Having the kernel DRM infrastructure named as a performance problem sounds rather funny.

The more standard setup is not supported by TI, they have dropped Xorg support from newer drivers. So unless we want to be stuck on Ubuntu 12.04 forever, we have to drop it.

 

[_wb_]

First a Pyra with an upgraded cpu board (which can be sold already), then a mainboard that fully utilizes the new possibilities of the new SoC (faster USB, faster SD, maybe one or two cameras, etc).

Let's say you have a Pyra. On one bitter cold morning you use the Pyra to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him. On the follow through the CPU board is knocked loose and damaged. You now have a broken Pyra. You contact ED, explaining away the dark reddish stains as barbecue sauce, and install a shiny new CPU board. The repaired Pyra sits unmolested for a few weeks until one morning, you find in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug with a bulging egg sac on its tail. You grab your trusty Pyra and bludgeon the thing into mush but in the process you crack it, chipping a notch right in the middle of the keyboard. Of course, a cracked case means another trip to dragonbox.de. ED sells you a brand new case and mainboard. As soon as it arrives at your home and you complete the repairs, though, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He’s also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed trimmer line, and it’s wearing that unique expression of “you’re the man who killed me last winter” resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.

You brandish your Pyra. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, “That’s the same Pyra that slayed me!”


Is he right?

That depends. Are you still the same person you were one year ago? Nearly all of the atoms in your body will have been replaced with different ones.

This is a philosophical Pandora's box you're opening here, so to speak.

 Having only fullscreen 3d is not a 'small' downside (all sorts of desktop applications from office to multimedia are already using/starting to use 3D) and requiring all 3D using software to be adapted or even recompiled for Pyra would be a major downside.

Just curious, what office / multimedia apps require 3D accelerated graphics?  Seems really inappropriate to me.

Anything that visualizes 3D models, of course. E.g. Blender, OpenSCAD, mathematical software that shows 3D plots, etc.

Also anything that uses the GPU for accelerated rendering of 2D or 3D effects (e.g. anything involving zooming, rotation, alpha blending). That includes software like LibreOffice Impress (the FOSS version of PowerPoint) and recent web browsers.

 

[Jan-Nik]

Also anything that uses the GPU for accelerated rendering of 2D or 3D effects (e.g. anything involving zooming, rotation, alpha blending). That includes software like LibreOffice Impress (the FOSS version of PowerPoint) and recent web browsers.

AFAIK recent web browsers only use OpenGL (which I assume ED means with "3D") for WebGL.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

But WebGL is awesome.

 

[_wb_]

Also anything that uses the GPU for accelerated rendering of 2D or 3D effects (e.g. anything involving zooming, rotation, alpha blending). That includes software like LibreOffice Impress (the FOSS version of PowerPoint) and recent web browsers.

AFAIK recent web browsers only use OpenGL (which I assume ED means with "3D") for WebGL.

No, they can also use the GPU to speed up things like scrolling and rendering CSS. See for example http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/gpu-accelerated-compositing-in-chrome

 

[bzar]

Hardware acceleration of graphics is increasingly everywhere . Coming even to your desktop applications via QtQuick2 scene graph rendering (not a hard dependency, but for better use experience)

 

[sebt3]

Hardware acceleration of graphics is increasingly everywhere . Coming even to your desktop applications via QtQuick2 scene graph rendering (not a hard dependency, but for better use experience)

Evas also provide this since... years

 

[Saber]

First a Pyra with an upgraded cpu board (which can be sold already), then a mainboard that fully utilizes the new possibilities of the new SoC (faster USB, faster SD, maybe one or two cameras, etc).

Let's say you have a Pyra. On one bitter cold morning you use the Pyra to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him. On the follow through the CPU board is knocked loose and damaged. You now have a broken Pyra. You contact ED, explaining away the dark reddish stains as barbecue sauce, and install a shiny new CPU board. The repaired Pyra sits unmolested for a few weeks until one morning, you find in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug with a bulging egg sac on its tail. You grab your trusty Pyra and bludgeon the thing into mush but in the process you crack it, chipping a notch right in the middle of the keyboard. Of course, a cracked case means another trip to dragonbox.de. ED sells you a brand new case and mainboard. As soon as it arrives at your home and you complete the repairs, though, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He’s also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed trimmer line, and it’s wearing that unique expression of “you’re the man who killed me last winter” resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.

You brandish your Pyra. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, “That’s the same Pyra that slayed me!”


Is he right?

The weirdest thing I've read here yet.

 

[WizardStan]

The weirdest thing I've read here yet.

It's paraphrased from John Dies At the End. It took me a while to find the actual quote because when I first read the book it was free but then the author started selling dead tree versions and now it's being made into a movie so I guess the free version was taken down.Good for him though, it's a good book, you should read it.

 

[bzar]

Hardware acceleration of graphics is increasingly everywhere . Coming even to your desktop applications via QtQuick2 scene graph rendering (not a hard dependency, but for better use experience)

Evas also provide this since... years

Very true. Doing OpenGL-accelerated anything has actually been in Qt since... Qt3? I think using QGLWidget as a QPainter backend came around Qt4. But QtQuick2 takes this to new heights . Won't make comparisons between the two, but the support has been there for a long time in both.

 

[Glyph Reader]

First a Pyra with an upgraded cpu board (which can be sold already), then a mainboard that fully utilizes the new possibilities of the new SoC (faster USB, faster SD, maybe one or two cameras, etc).

Let's say you have a Pyra. On one bitter cold morning you use the Pyra to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him. On the follow through the CPU board is knocked loose and damaged. You now have a broken Pyra. You contact ED, explaining away the dark reddish stains as barbecue sauce, and install a shiny new CPU board. The repaired Pyra sits unmolested for a few weeks until one morning, you find in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug with a bulging egg sac on its tail. You grab your trusty Pyra and bludgeon the thing into mush but in the process you crack it, chipping a notch right in the middle of the keyboard. Of course, a cracked case means another trip to dragonbox.de. ED sells you a brand new case and mainboard. As soon as it arrives at your home and you complete the repairs, though, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He’s also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed trimmer line, and it’s wearing that unique expression of “you’re the man who killed me last winter” resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.

You brandish your Pyra. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, “That’s the same Pyra that slayed me!”


Is he right?

The weirdest thing I've read here yet.

If I went on a murderous rampage, I would do it with the Pyra in hand, soaked in the blood of my enemies.  

-Glyph Reader

 

[Neelix]

I'm now fully expecting there to be a thread some day on how to best blood-proof your Pyra

- Neelix

 

[bzar]

I'm now fully expecting there to be a thread some day on how to best blood-proof your Pyra

- Neelix

Now we have a reason for it to have a red case. Blood red.

 

[_jr_]

How much slower is a more standard setup? And why? Having the kernel DRM infrastructure named as a performance problem sounds rather funny.

The more standard setup is not supported by TI, they have dropped Xorg support from newer drivers. So unless we want to be stuck on Ubuntu 12.04 forever, we have to drop it.

Thanks, so I misunderstood? Pyra can use a mostly mainline kernel and user land, but will lack X11 based apps that want to use OpenGL? Does this affect things like WINE?

 

[EvilDragon]

We're trying to skip DRM, not OpenGLES.

 

[Grench]

We're trying to skip DRM, not OpenGLES.

And here I had given up on this thread and considered it thoroughly derailed.

Is there enough new stuff to feed us another update?  Any decisions on whether the 'space bar' is going to be two buttons wide (where it is) or split into two buttons or two buttons wide (somewhere else - bottom middle?) ?

There are several ideas spinning rapidly in the Keyboard discussions - but it would be nice to know our physical constraints.

Thanks!

 

[Tensuke]

The weirdest thing I've read here yet.

It's paraphrased from John Dies At the End. It took me a while to find the actual quote because when I first read the book it was free but then the author started selling dead tree versions and now it's being made into a movie so I guess the free version was taken down.
Good for him though, it's a good book, you should read it.

The movie's already out actually. It's...well, it's worth a watch at least if you've read it. It kind of leaves a lot of important stuff out, imo, like the whole point of the axe story.

sorry for the offtopicness