Speaking of edited in, you put your big response to my critique of your dream thread as an edit so I never got to respond to it, so uh, well..
Not a bit.
CraigIX stated in another message that he was debating between 4GB or 8GB of RAM for this device.
To be able to address 8GB of RAM you fairly well need a 48bit or wider data stream.
Since nobody makes 48bit computers - 64bit is the next logical conclusion.
Not dreaming, just extrapolation.
Exactly, Craig tragically doesn't understand that the SoC he uses won't be 64-bit. Or doesn't understand that it needs to be so for 8GB to make a difference. I told him this in this thread and I hope he gets it.
CraigIX has stated previously that this device must be the most powerful handheld ever. USB 3 is now becoming commonplace on new notebooks and devices. If it doesn't have USB 3.0 out the back, then it isn't going to be all that powerful in 2014, now is it?
No matter what Craig says there are limits to what he's actually going to be able to do. Which is why he should be careful about what he hypes.
If the device is going to have USB 3.0 out the back via my above statements, then adding an internalized hub on the circuit board may or may not add more room than bringing direct ports off of the SoC. The fact that an internalized USB hub could handle the USB port off the back, the card slots, the networking adapters (BT & 802.11), keyboard & nub inputs, and potentially the video output as well - wouldn't that potentially replace all but one of those connections to the SoC while giving a system bandwidth of roughly 5GB/sec to any one of them talking to the CPU while -simplifying- the motherboard layout immensely? It's an idea I put out there in this DREAMERS thread. They don't HAVE to follow it - but it is, in my opinion, a rather unique and potentially very effective way to simplify the entire unit.
What you're saying makes no sense! If you made all of those things go over USB3 instead of going to the SoC you will just be replacing their connections to the USB hub chip instead.. You will have to add the hub chip.. and for anything that doesn't communicate in USB3 naturally you'll need a transceiver chip to convert what it does (most devices will NOT do USB3 or any other USB for that matter). Pretty much all of these communications are over simple serial protocols. How on earth do you think this does anything but ADD to PCB routing complexity and number of components on the board?
Having the nub chips of all things over USB3 is just crazy!
You're neglecting the realities of computing beyond the CPU.
In the era of a 486, most hard disks were 40-160MB and transferred data in the 256K-2MB/sec range. The RAM was particularly slow by today's standard too. The 486 CPU was, most of the time, waiting on it's RAM and disk to catch up.
Utter nonsense. Especially for the things most people want to run in DOS emulation, games. You're obsessed with storage performance and somehow think it's the performance bottleneck for everything.
Fast forward to the Pandora. When doing DOS emulation, it isn't the sub-systems we're waiting on - it's the CPU and the fact that it isn't JUST handling that one aspect of things. That single core is maintaining the primary OS (Angstrom), an emulation layer (DosBox), and the program we're running - AND whatever else we have running in the background on the main device. Three or more things on one core - each in contention for CPU time on it's own threads.
Fast forward to the hypothetical Pandora II with a wider data path (64bit as above) and big RAM and four cores running 2Ghz (or more). Yes, DosBox itself is only going to get one of those cores at any given time, but it's easily going to get 100% of a core, not just portions of one. DosBox will also be, in theory, recompiled to run under the 64bit host OS. It will no longer have to chunk/thunk down 32bit DOS code to push it through to the CPU with it's wrappers around it - it could insert that directly into the 64bit processing stream with wrappers and all. So, from DOSBox's perspective, we have, roughly, a 7X gain in CPU speed itself (getting a whole 2Ghz core instead of 1/2 or less of a 600Mhz core). With the wider data path - that actually doubles it again since there is no chunk/thunk required. So, 14X. Next look at the ecosystem it runs in. Instead of 20MB/sec reads from SD we could run DOSBox itself - and it's drive contents from RAM. CraigIX said dual channel DDR3 is being considered. That is roughly 24GB/sec - or roughly 1000 times the speed of the current Pandora's SD slots. I'd say that's worth a 'double' on the performance guide for what can/can't be played in this example.
So, we're up to having DOSBox on the Pandora II exhibit roughtly 28 times the performance that it does now.
There is not going to be a 64-bit host OS. There's not going to be a 64-bit CPU. Please stop speculating on the performance of emulators, you don't understand how they work even in the slightest, what you're saying about "chunking/thunking" and "wrappers" makes my head hurt.. You're just making random things up...
I'd tell you to profile DOSBox on Pandora to substantiate your wild claim that it's wasting half the CPU time on imaginary things that will go away with this new CPU (due to being 64-bit of all things!) but I'm not sure you know how to..? You'd also see they're not spending all their time waiting on the SD card! And dual channel LPDDR3 (which isn't DDR3) most certainly will NOT be 24GB/s, please familiarize yourself a little more with memory technology on mobile devices.. the highest end you're liable to see is
maybe around 1600 MT/s per channel, with two 32-bit chips. That's about 12.8GB/s, okay? Samsung themselves quote that number for Exynos 5, which as far as I'm aware is the only game in town offering LPDDR3. Chances are Pandora 2 won't actually clock it so high (IF it has LPDDR3 support to begin with - has anyone even announced when they'll make LPDDR3 available?) because it isn't a tablet.
After searching I found a benchmark that has crossed through the history of CPUs. We could even run it on the current Pandora as native, under DosBox, under Amiga, etc if someone is really really bored.
http://field.hypermart.net/CPU/cpu.htm
Using a 486/33 (which is what the chart has a spec for and is still roughly right for the current Pandora's DosBox), it would run this test in roughly 100 seconds.
Assuming I'm even remotely on track for my above assumptions, the Pandora II would be able to run the test in roughly 100/28 = 4.16 seconds.
Cross referencing back to the chart this makes my above assumptions/estimations/wildassguesses place the Pandora II as roughly equivalent to a 200Mhz Intel Pentium Pro. I used to play the original Half Life on a 180Mhz Pentium Pro.
You mean, the Pandora would be able to run the test in 4.16 seconds in DOSBox? Based on your completely made up reasoning??
So - not quite a P3 under this guestimate. PIII did the test in 1.45 seconds, So I originally estimated high by 2.25X too high.
Still, 28X performance leap sounds huge - but all things considered, I think that is going to be closer to reality than 2-4X faster.
I wish I knew what made you feel confident in your reasoning or at all qualified to make it..
As far as running an Android or iPad tablet OS inside an emulation layer - we're already doing that with Android.
We're already doing what? Running Android on Android? That's true. Running iOS on Android? Uh, no.
Of course you'll be able to run Android on Pandora 2. Everyone knows this. Of course, it's not "inside an emulation layer", it's because it's ported to it. That has absolutely nothing to do with being able to run iOS.
The CPUs are the same. In my humble opinion it's just a matter of time before we have a VM environment for Apple inside Android - or Android inside Apple - or since it's all ARM code running on nearly the same CPUs, both inside a Pandora II. That feat is a lot easier to predict than emulating a P-III. When dealing with a multi-core CPU and being able to give one to the system and two or more virtual cors to each of the running VMs - it starts to make good sense.
The CPUs are the same (or compatible, anyway) on XBox and your PC, how is it that you can't just run XBox games? Even with all the fancy hardware virtualization capabilities your PC has?
iOS has been out for 5 years now and no one has ran it on anything non-Apple yet, and Pandora 2 doesn't really do anything to change that equation.. There's way more involved in this than you realize.
