Open... and close... and open...

[rygD]

all text of my post is about the keyboard thread. but yeah, i'll mark it as spoiler (for the keyboard thread) i don't even know any fan theories about twin peaks ._.'

Ok, I thought it was talking more about Twin Peaks.

 

[Swordfish II]

@rygD

Nah I never really thought you were pushing super hard, it was one person plus a couple of gpdwin folks. But really this is one of the nicest forms on the net.

Regarding pyra, I also don't think the ram is the sole holdup as a mentioned a few others, but it would be nice to accelerate the timeline any way we can.

Revenge is super soapy, but still kinda entertaining. Defenders is also worth a watch.

 

[Pyramancer]

The idea of a magnesium heat sink made me smile. This would provide us with the spectacle of a Pyra in flames! Nicely thematic, but Pyras are rather pricey for a one-time entertainment use, however spectacular the effect.

Massive bloc of magnesium presents no risk... You'd be hard pressed to heat it hard enough for it to ignite... The rest of the pyra would be completely charred before the magnesium would burn...

(Depends how fine you cut the radiating fins.) I had hoped that what I wrote wouldn't be mistaken for a serious comment; serves me right indulging my whimsical side -- that always seems to annoy people and/or elicit overly literal interpretations!
[doublepost=1504551526,1504551452][/doublepost]

Magnesium is very light and strong, used in a lot of places such as Thinkpad laptop frame, and Helicopters to give two examples.

Hmm... these are not elemental magnesium but rather some magnesium alloy, are they not?

 

[jeeks]

Ok, I thought it was talking more about Twin Peaks.

sorry, didn't mean to make you or anyone else flinch because of possible spoilers D:

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Then the dev team needs to figure out how they are doing it and what the difference is.

2Ghz, 4GB & Ubuntu (Debian derrivative) is what they advertise as supported.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2014/0...lopment-board-is-now-available-for-149-euros/

Maybe the 2Ghz timings and 4GB RAM settings can be harvested from the items in their git repository?

You are quoting an old article, I suggest you to use reliable sources of informations, e.g. the constructor's website :
https://www.isee.biz/products/igep-processor-boards/igepv5-omap5432
"Processor board DUAL core ARM Cortex-A15 up to 1,5 GHz"

 

[Xcl4m4t10n]

(edit: this is not sarcasm or anything, i just watched twin peaks and now i'm out of stuff to do/watch too D: )

The thing is that I actually have tons of stuff to do, just wanted to tame here XD.

 

[Letalis Sonus]

Hmm... these are not elemental magnesium but rather some magnesium alloy, are they not?

Yes, the Thinkpads use a titanium alloy.

However, you can already get cars with a solid magnesium trunk lid, like a Ford Mondeo (sold as Fusion in the US).

 

[WizardStan]

And for an upgrade board a year after release, it would have been awesome. Where the RAM doubling went wrong for the initial release was when 1. The community pushed for a pre-sale specification that 2. Had no working/operational example and 3. Was not necessary for launch units and 4. Has no current sane need/use.

If there had been no problems then you wouldn't have any reason to complain. The only reason the community's collective decision is an issue is because it is causing a problem. It's wholly unfair to complain that people made the wrong decision so long ago based on current information: we couldn't have known what kind of problems there would be, and everything pointed to 4GB just being a straight up upgrade from 2GB, so why shouldn't we have investigated it? There's no real "need" for a lot of features. If something had gone catastrophically wrong with the vibramotor and ED, determined to at least try, spent an extra few weeks working with hns to make it work we would be in the exact same position and you'd be able to apply your same complaints to that.
I get where you're coming from, I had the same emotion when the uSD/eMMC came up, but I complained about the decision to keep going, not the original decision. Blaming the original decision for the current situation is just blaming people for not having precognition.

Pyra could initially ship at 2GB and save 4GB for an upgrade board some day if it can then be reliable.

Yeah, it could, and it may still go that way. It's up to ED, he's the one in charge. He can, at any point in time, decide the 4GB issue is taking too long to solve and just go to production with 2GB.

 

[Dark Pulse]

Pyra could initially ship at 2GB and save 4GB for an upgrade board some day if it can then be reliable.

Except it can't, because CPU + RAM is on its own board. Replacing the RAM means replacing the board, which if we're going to do that is going to be silly to just double the RAM and keep the processor.

These aren't your regular desktop RAM sticks or even laptop-style SODIMMs. This device is too small for that. It's soldered to the board itself, so to replace the RAM, you're also replacing the board.

Replacing the board sure as hell will cost more than the doubling of the RAM will, and considering how many pre-orders are for the 4 GB version, to say that the reduction would be disastrous on ED would be an understatement. It could possibly do him in if there's hundreds of cancellations.

I know of no examples of working devices that reliably use 4GB or 8GB of RAM on an OMAP. Does anyone?

How the hell do you equivocate "I haven't seen one do it" with "It can't be done?"

Such blindness prompted me to do a 10 second google search. And lookee what I found!

If you're not interested in clicking that link, though, here's some numbers:

• Compulab, CM-T54 System on Module:
  • Up to 4GB DDR3 and up to 32GB on-board eMMC
• IGEPv5: TI OMAP5432 Dual Cortex-A15 High Performance & Low Power Platform
  • The IGEPv5 platform supports until 4096 MB DDR3L and 8GB eMMC

You can try to say "Those aren't in anything" all you want, and while you'd be technically right since those are development boards and not production hardware, clearly Texas Instruments wouldn't have, ON THEIR OWN WIKI, stuff that can support 2+ GB of RAM if the OMAP 5 couldn't handle more than 2 GB of RAM.

Again, ten seconds of google searching.

Please think with your brains, not with your ass.

If Minecraft is a single process, then you might be out of luck even with a 4GB version.
The maximum size a single app can be on a 32bit CPU under linux is 2GB, unless things has changed.

Minecraft detects based on CPU if it should download 32-bit or 64-bit. There is definitely a 64-bit version of Minecraft - that's what I run on my home PC.

Also, you are confusing "app size" with memory consumption, and in that case, 3 GB is actually the de-facto limit for most 32-bit apps. Regardless, moot, since Minecraft has a 64-bit version.

By my calculation approximately 92% of pre orders are for a 4GB unit

Yeah, that was a goof on my part. I was counting the mobile units (as those clearly proved more popular).

The preorder tracker is still up and accurately tracking, which is where I pulled my numbers from. Out of (currently) 1096 units, a whopping 25 are 2GB units in any way, shape, or form - 8 Euro Mobile, 3 US Mobile, 14 Non-Mobile.

This is actually closer to 98% of pre-orders being for a 4 GB unit.

It isn't exactly enough to justify a production run of only 2 GB units unless ED eats some of the cost - IIRC optimal for him is batches of 500, and there's not nearly enough for him to do this without eating some kind of loss unless he can get it made in a smaller batch (like 50 or something).

 

[WizardStan]

Regardless, moot, since Minecraft has a 64-bit version.

The Pyra doesn't have a 64 bit CPU.

 

[Dark Pulse]

The Pyra doesn't have a 64 bit CPU.

Right, but I was saying that there was a 64-bit version of Minecraft, so if a 64-bit CPU comes out eventually for the Pyra, it'd be fully possible for it to run the 64-bit version of Minecraft.

(Maybe a Cortex-A57? Granted, we'd probably have to move away from OMAP for those... there hasn't been a new OMAP product since 2013. With Tegra out, Atom and Snapdragon are the two most likely candidates, but obviously Atom isn't ARM... at this point, an updated CPU board is sounding more like it'd be a full-on system rewrite to support it, ack.)

 

[WizardStan]

Right, but I was saying that there was a 64-bit version of Minecraft, so if a 64-bit CPU comes out eventually for the Pyra, it'd be fully possible for it to run the 64-bit version of Minecraft.

Yes, but that has no bearing on the current discussion of whether 4GB in the Pyra would benefit Minecraft or not.

 

[Dark Pulse]

Yes, but that has no bearing on the current discussion of whether 4GB in the Pyra would benefit Minecraft or not.

Yes, and that's the trickier question to answer.

Cortex-A15s do support LPAE. Virtual address space, however, remains 32-bit. So while it can use more RAM than 4 GB, an individual process still caps at 4 GB of space.

My guess would be that 3-3.5 GB would thus be the practical limit it could use, and possibly less than that, owing to the Pyra's 4 GB of RAM on 4 GB models - you'd have to swap all other programs to a swapfile if you wanted to use the full 4 GB, and even then you'd end up a bit short due to the OS's needs.

Worse comes to worse, Minecraft will be limited to 2 GB. Granted, on a 2 GB Pyra, that'd be unattainable for the same reason 4 GB on a 4 GB Pyra won't work - the OS needs some RAM and so do other running programs.

Either way, it's something to keep an eye on for if a future Pyra CPU comes with a 64-bit CPU, especially if it comes with 6-8 GB of RAM.

 

[rygD]

(Maybe a Cortex-A57? Granted, we'd probably have to move away from OMAP for those... there hasn't been a new OMAP product since 2013. With Tegra out, Atom and Snapdragon are the two most likely candidates, but obviously Atom isn't ARM... at this point, an updated CPU board is sounding more like it'd be a full-on system rewrite to support it, ack.)

I agree, and over time I have seen several reasons why I feel ARM was the right choice. A couple that really bother me personally are this feeling I get that we wouldn't get optimized software because people would say why bother (I hope this is all in my head), and that it would be compared even more than it currently is to x86 devices with a similar form factor. For me the Pyra is greater than the specs and being a clamshell with a keyboard, just as the Pandora is, and the DOS based palmtops have been for their hardcore fans (because they still have a place in the world today, and it is on the frontlines, not sitting in the back of a drawer).

Anyway, before my passion takes me more away from my point, the more I think about it the less likely an upgrade board seems, although I am still hoping that whatever company it was that said they would only allow their SoCs to be used if a company they picked designs the product will go for the idea that all they are designing is the CPU board for a pre-existing device as an upgrade. As long as it would be an improvement, I might accept it being extremely underclocked (and with less than half the maximum RAM it can support ) for practical reasons. We will see. Maybe things will change and work out for us when the time comes. Or maybe the main board will need to be redesigned so that we can use the next generation of the RaspberryPi or whatever.

 

[pimaster]

As a quiet member:
When the preorders first when up (https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/th...d-previously-named-starts-in-two-hours.77328/) in May 2016, we were told:

"As many were asking for a 4GB unit, we added that one as well - for 30 EUR more.
However, we do not yet know if that works well, so in case it doesn't, you will get a 2GB unit (and of course won't have to pay the 30 EUR more in the end)."​

It is interesting that we have moved to a point where the 4GB is so close to working that abandoning feels bad. Sunk cost is a terrible thing to deal with.
If I end up with 2GB unit by Christmas, I'd be happy. If a 4GB board is available 6-12 months after that. I'd be upgrading.
I would be getting what I signed up for.

Now, I love hanging out on the IRC channel.
I was so amused when I got to read that the wrong memory chip had been used in the 4GB samples. We got the usual version, not the mobile/low voltage version. There was checking that needed to be done to find out if we ordered the wrong model number or whether the wrong one was delivered. I was surprised that a post wasn't made to update the crowd regarding the issue. I hope that I'm not breaking any unwritten (or written) guideline by forwarding this information. I hope that I don't take any thunder away from an ED post.

I'm still behind ED and his choices. Huge respect for his patience and management of the hoard. I think we all share his frustration that it would be nice to have it all done already so we can start working on the software en masse.

 

[rygD]

I hope no one gets upset by me being off-topic:
How has the opening and closing been going? I am still available to help out with that testing if a prototype gets sent my way.

 

[EvilDragon]

If the boards have to be reduced to 2GB, I don't know if I'd be still willing to keep up with the pre-order to be completely honest.
As I would be paying a premium for postage and the device that would be kinda underpowered to something like a GPD-Win which is quite a bit cheaper.
The absolute main reason I pre-ordered the pyra was for 3G web browsing which takes quite a chunk of the ram out.

I wouldn't mind the extra voltage for the extra 2GB but hopefully there will be a better solution.

Ah well, that's Windows for you.

Here is a screenshot of my current desktop:



As you can see, it runs Plasma (KDE5), FreeCad, Gimp, Evolution Mail (with calendar, task and contacts sync running), MoneyPlex, some smaller tools (like Kate, Speedcrunch, Konsole), and Nextcloud (can't be seen in the picture though).
All at the same time. And the memory usage is still under 2GB RAM, and that's a 1920x1080-resolution.

Plasma alone uses 600MB of RAM, Evolution about 200MB (it really eats a lot of memory).
The browser (with all the tabs you can see here) uses around 300MB of RAM.

This is certainly a lot more that I ever want to run on a Pyra at the same time (FreeCAD and Gimp...? )

If I switched to something like LXDE on my laptop, the full memory usage would be around 1.3GB for all of that.

So yeah... 2GB is plenty, as long as you don't use anything that simply hogs the memory for some reason

I still want to get the 4GB Pyra working though

 

[Kippykip]

Nope it was not you. This person we later found out hasn't preordered.. Come to think of it I havent seen them around in a while.

That was a guy called m@t, I think he got banned

Ah well, that's Windows for you.

Here is a screenshot of my current desktop:

As you can see, it runs Plasma (KDE5), FreeCad, Gimp, Evolution Mail (with calendar, task and contacts sync running), MoneyPlex, some smaller tools (like Kate, Speedcrunch, Konsole), and Nextcloud (can't be seen in the picture though).
All at the same time. And the memory usage is still under 2GB RAM, and that's a 1920x1080-resolution.

Plasma alone uses 600MB of RAM, Evolution about 200MB (it really eats a lot of memory).
The browser (with all the tabs you can see here) uses around 300MB of RAM.

This is certainly a lot more that I ever want to run on a Pyra at the same time (FreeCAD and Gimp...? )

If I switched to something like LXDE on my laptop, the full memory usage would be around 1.3GB for all of that.

So yeah... 2GB is plenty, as long as you don't use anything that simply hogs the memory for some reason

I still want to get the 4GB Pyra working though

Oh wow, maybe I should use Linux more!

 

[Silent-Hunter]

Oh man I completely forgot about him!

 

[tarator]

This is my desktop PC running Eclipse and starting a Java-Software for Debugging.
Firefox is running with only some essential Tabs.
This is on Kubuntu 16.04.

As you can see it already needs more than 2GB of RAM right after starting. The memory usage will get up while Programming/Debugging.
So: This is a real-life example where 2GB of RAM is clearly not sufficient....

This is my every-day setup on my working-laptop.
Of course I don't plan to do all my programming work on the Pyra, but it would be nice if it's at least possible in case I need to fix something, while I'm on holidays...