Pandora 2 specifications and price

[urisma]

Err. Ps2 emulation and gamecube emulation are open source. Look up PCSX2 and Dolphin. They do not, unfortunately, have ARM ports.

 

[Foxgod]

Err. Ps2 emulation and gamecube emulation are open source. Look up PCSX2 and Dolphin. They do not, unfortunately, have ARM ports.

Lets hope they can be ported over without too much trouble.


OMAP 5 should be a good contender for emulating those systems.

 

[WizardStan]

Useful in 2014? Yes, I'd expect it will be.

I see two flaws in your expectation


1) Outside of Firefox and Internet Explorer, the average user is not fully utilizing even 2GB of RAM right now. More is always pushed on consumers, but the vast majority of them are not using it. I can't foresee a 4 times increase in what people need in 2 years, not on desktops and especially not on mobile platforms.


2) ARM based mobile systems have renewed the desire in companies to minimize RAM usage: something that may require hundreds of MB on a desktop is done in dozens on a mobile platform simply because the current mobile systems do not have the huge excess RAM that desktops do. What you're proposing is that this reversed trend of excess will again reverse in the next two years. I can't believe that.


These two ideas lead me to conclude that we have effectively reached a plateau of what is actually useful. There will be steady increases, but not in the leap you seem to be suggesting. As an anecdote (which proves nothing but is food for thought) I bought my midrange laptop 3 years ago with 3GB of RAM (which has a typical footprint of 1.6GB used). A high-end laptop right now has 4-6GB of RAM.

And by the end of 2013 I don't expect 4-8GB of RAM to be a cost issue.

If that becomes the case then there is no issue, but if using 4GB of RAM instead of 8 means a $100+ cost saving, there's a good chance I'll be championing the cost saving when the time comes. Hopefully by then the cost difference will truly be negligible and we can afford to be wasteful.

 

[craigix]

Galaxy Note2 screen confirmed at 1680x1050. /ot


Oh, if 8GB of RAM was $100 more then we would probably make it an optional extra. But I don't expect it to be much more than $20 more.

 

[Foxgod]

Galaxy Note2 screen confirmed at 1680x1050. /ot


Oh, if 8GB of RAM was $100 more then we would probably make it an optional extra. But I don't expect it to be much more than $20 more.

Panda 2 will be a pizza with everything on it for me nothing optional


Is a bigger screen in the planning?


Perhaps the speakers can be omitted from the Panda 2, if space becomes an issue, people could use usb speakers instead, if they dont wanna use headphones.

 

[WizardStan]

Oh, if 8GB of RAM was $100 more then we would probably make it an optional extra. But I don't expect it to be much more than $20 more.

Hope you're right. My models of RAM cost are based on historical prices of desktop RAM, I haven't been watching mobile RAM prices as closely for as long but given recent improvements in the manufacturing process I suppose I can imagine sudden drops in price. $20 for 4GB still seems a little low, but we can burn that bridge when we come to it.

 

[craigix]

I meant that the 8GB module would only be about $20 more than the 4GB module.


I'd expect the 4GB module itself to be over $20.

 

[SNESFAN]

1gb of ram is comfy on android currently as the platform evolves and becomes more elaborate with more elaborate apps i can see the need for twice that in a couple years. I understand that only accounts for 2 of the supposed 8


Well i have several theories.


1 actual desktop replacements. Being able to get seamless transititon between mobile device user experience and a real desktop with a port replicator etc. True the current setup of mobile apps reward optimized small footprints. I wouldnt suggest anyone really run ubuntu desktop with less than 2 gb. If you are running 2 envrionments os's parallel then you could esentially double that also


2 moving more to ramdrives instead of solid state media. Running an entire os from a ram drive would give better i/o than sdcard read/writes. You could also eliminate most cacheing also prolonging the life of the media. I also think it has advantages when it comes to security and making your os more rom like.


I also dont think we can accurately predict the future of the future. At the time 128 seemed really good for ram when the pandora was announced, then 256 was announced and we had very similar overkill talks. Now many years later its not nearly enough for some things and 512 is the standard that is now also showing its age. Im sure theres stuff that hasnt even been thought of yet that will be on the cuff of comming out when the p2 drops and if not then by the time people are going to want to upgrade from that when it is at the end of its susposed life.


Sent from my MB612 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Foxgod]

1gb of ram is comfy on android currently as the platform evolves and becomes more elaborate with more elaborate apps i can see the need for twice that in a couple years. I understand that only accounts for 2 of the supposed 8


Well i have several theories.


1 actual desktop replacements. Being able to get seamless transititon between mobile device user experience and a real desktop with a port replicator etc. True the current setup of mobile apps reward optimized small footprints. I wouldnt suggest anyone really run ubuntu desktop with less than 2 gb. If you are running 2 envrionments os's parallel then you could esentially double that also


2 moving more to ramdrives instead of solid state media. Running an entire os from a ram drive would give better i/o than sdcard read/writes. You could also eliminate most cacheing also prolonging the life of the media. I also think it has advantages when it comes to security and making your os more rom like.


I also dont think we can accurately predict the future of the future. At the time 128 seemed really good for ram when the pandora was announced, then 256 was announced and we had very similar overkill talks. Now many years later its not nearly enough for some things and 512 is the standard that is now also showing its age. Im sure theres stuff that hasnt even been thought of yet that will be on the cuff of comming out when the p2 drops and if not then by the time people are going to want to upgrade from that when it is at the end of its susposed life.


Sent from my MB612 using Tapatalk 2

At 8 GB you can have a lot of apps in your memory to swap between, before the system slows down, thats a nice reason to have a lot of ram.

 

[Exophase]

Pretty normal I'd expect by 2013, or at least available on some top end devices.

The benefit of going for 8GB over 4GB on Cortex-A15 are going to be minimal. Yes, it has physical address extensions that could let you use it to some extent but individual processes will be limited to 4GB, including the kernel separation, and it's uncertain if support for the extensions will really be that great in Linux. The kernel devs are not exactly enthusiastic about it.


And you shouldn't put too much of a "why not, can't hurt, surely will be too cheap to make a difference" attitude towards RAM. One major earthquake in the wrong country and suddenly your RAM is going up in price for a while instead of going down. It has happened before, and with other components too - remember what happened with hard drives? Things are more risky with RAM now that the industry is all but controlled by two South Korean companies, both of whom are even getting nervous over how far down the market has pushed RAM prices.


Then there are the considerations that added board complexity gives you, if it means going with more ICs.

Galaxy Note2 screen confirmed at 1680x1050. /ot

Really? All I can find are rumors, nothing resembling a confirmation, and that's with news posts about an hour old..

Lets hope they can be ported over without too much trouble.


OMAP 5 should be a good contender for emulating those systems.

No way is Pandora 2 going to be powerful enough for Dolphin (at least anything close to realtime speed), my Ivy Bridge laptop (2.3-3.1GHz, 4C/8T) barely is. Even with a 2GHz Cortex-A15 it'd be optimistic to expect the per-thread performance to be even half as good.


PCSX2 is probably nearly as hopeless.


Dreamcast, PSP and DS are probably more viable.

 

[Foxgod]

Pretty normal I'd expect by 2013, or at least available on some top end devices.

The benefit of going for 8GB over 4GB on Cortex-A15 are going to be minimal. Yes, it has physical address extensions that could let you use it to some extent but individual processes will be limited to 4GB, including the kernel separation, and it's uncertain if support for the extensions will really be that great in Linux. The kernel devs are not exactly enthusiastic about it.


And you shouldn't put too much of a "why not, can't hurt, surely will be too cheap to make a difference" attitude towards RAM. One major earthquake in the wrong country and suddenly your RAM is going up in price for a while instead of going down. It has happened before, and with other components too - remember what happened with hard drives? Things are more risky with RAM now that the industry is all but controlled by two South Korean companies, both of whom are even getting nervous over how far down the market has pushed RAM prices.


Then there are the considerations that added board complexity gives you, if it means going with more ICs.

Galaxy Note2 screen confirmed at 1680x1050. /ot

Really? All I can find are rumors, nothing resembling a confirmation, and that's with news posts about an hour old..

Lets hope they can be ported over without too much trouble.


OMAP 5 should be a good contender for emulating those systems.

No way is Pandora 2 going to be powerful enough for Dolphin (at least anything close to realtime speed), my Ivy Bridge laptop (2.3-3.1GHz, 4C/8T) barely is. Even with a 2GHz Cortex-A15 it'd be optimistic to expect the per-thread performance to be even half as good.


PCSX2 is probably nearly as hopeless.


Dreamcast, PSP and DS are probably more viable.

The emu's might have been optimized enough by then to run on P2, if not it will indeed be an impossible task.


A year ago you needed a quadcore to run dolphin, it does well on a dual core right now with the latest builds.

 

[Exophase]

The emulators are probably not going to be two or three times faster than they are now, they've already been optimized for years. The developers are not clueless..

 

[Foxgod]

The emulators are probably not going to be two or three times faster than they are now, they've already been optimized for years. The developers are not clueless..

Actually, they can still go a way, they are by no means as stable as for example psx and snes emulation is currently.


Optimization takes a lot of time, and developers prefer to focus on compatibility first.

 

[Exophase]

Actually, they can still go a way, they are by no means as stable as for example psx and snes emulation is currently.
Optimization takes a lot of time, and developers prefer to focus on compatibility first.

If you aren't personally knowledgeable on what goes into optimizing emulators then you probably shouldn't make claims like this.These emulators have been in development for many years now, PCSX2 for a good decade. While yes, of course they care about compatibility, performance was a major, major part of the formula since day one.


Sure, this doesn't apply to all emulators, or maybe even most - a good example is desmume which has never been that performance oriented - but that's because you can play them full speed on mid-range to high-end computers. If, during development, the best computers aren't fast enough to play the emulator then you'll see a lot of emphasis on making it as fast as possible and this definitely applied to PCSX2 and Dolphin. So unless you have a reason to believe they're massively deficient in spite of this you shouldn't hold to the hope that they'll get tremendously faster now.


Of course no matter how fast (or slow) the x86 versions get a lot of new work is still going to need to be done for ARM versions, but I doubt those will be vastly faster either.

 

[Foxgod]

Actually, they can still go a way, they are by no means as stable as for example psx and snes emulation is currently.
Optimization takes a lot of time, and developers prefer to focus on compatibility first.

If you aren't personally knowledgeable on what goes into optimizing emulators then you probably shouldn't make claims like this.These emulators have been in development for many years now, PCSX2 for a good decade. While yes, of course they care about compatibility, performance was a major, major part of the formula since day one.


Sure, this doesn't apply to all emulators, or maybe even most - a good example is desmume which has never been that performance oriented - but that's because you can play them full speed on mid-range to high-end computers. If, during development, the best computers aren't fast enough to play the emulator then you'll see a lot of emphasis on making it as fast as possible and this definitely applied to PCSX2 and Dolphin. So unless you have a reason to believe they're massively deficient in spite of this you shouldn't hold to the hope that they'll get tremendously faster now.


Of course no matter how fast (or slow) the x86 versions get a lot of new work is still going to need to be done for ARM versions, but I doubt those will be vastly faster either.

Well, people are gonna want to try and run them on their powerfull phones sooner or later, thats where the P2 profits from it.

 

[Exophase]

Yeah, you'll see ports to Android (and probably to Pandora). Then familiar sounding voices showering the porters with praise, saying that now they only have to wait for the impossibleinevitable optimization that'll turn it into something wonderful. That optimization will usually never come, rinse and repeat.. Then people like you will tell people like me to keep my mouth shut, saying things like Mupen64plus were done even though "everyone" said it was impossible therefore whatever you want to believe in will be possible too, etc.

 

[Foxgod]

Yeah, you'll see ports to Android (and probably to Pandora). Then familiar sounding voices showering the porters with praise, saying that now they only have to wait for the impossibleinevitable optimization that'll turn it into something wonderful. That optimization will usually never come, rinse and repeat.. Then people like you will tell people like me to keep my mouth shut, saying things like Mupen64plus were done even though "everyone" said it was impossible therefore whatever you want to believe in will be possible too, etc.

Did someone hurt your feelings?


For the rest, wel see, when it comes to emulators and open source devices, its about progress, and every progress made is a step forward.


Dont get to tight up about the whole situation, it wont get you anywhere.

 

[WizardStan]

now they only have to wait for the impossibleinevitable optimization that'll turn it into something wonderful.

Don't forget the ubiquitous "hardware acceleration" that automatically makes everything faster as soon as you start using it.

 

[Grench]

Exo stated that even with the microSD he wants inside the unit, that he still wants two full size slots exposed.


My take is, yes, if you're going microSD inside you'll still need two full sized slots because microSD performance and capacity has always sucked.


However, if you were to put one full sized, full USB 3.0 speed SDXC port up behind the battery, you would only need one exposed SD slot on the device.


I'm actually arguing for one less component and a smaller footprint by eliminating the microSD port. Both sides of this argument are for two full size ports - just one of us wants a hidden 3rd port microSD.

Nope. I'm agreeing with exophase on this: no matter what is internal, be it micro or full sized, two readily swapable SD cards is preferable. Adding a microSD internal is a feature increase. Your idea to move one of them internally is a feature decrease. Feature decreases, while not strictly undesirable, should at least be approached with reservation.


Since you would be satisfied with just a single SD card slot, what is preventing you from using your latest, greatest SDXC card in one of the external slots and ignoring the internal? You would be no worse off than if it were internal, and those that don't care about the latest, greatest are satisfied and able to continue using two cards of choice. Everyone wins.

Keep in mind, as CraigIX has stated previously, the plan is to work without internal NAND.


At least one of the partitions on at least one of these cards will be getting used as boot.


As stated, I don't want to restrict my boot card to 1 year old technology that is finally showing up in microSD cards. That you would want to seems far more silly to me than my standing by full sized SD cards would to you.


In order to keep users from ejecting the boot drive, a good idea was presented months ago to have it hidden up behind the battery. I don't think I originated that idea - but it is a good one.


If the device only has two SD cards, then one of them must be used as boot and should not be removed during operation. It may as well be internalized - and there is NO DECREASE IN FUNCTIONALITY that way.


If I can put a full sized full capacity and full capability SD card in as the hidden boot device, I will only need one user facing SD card slot. Would I like two exposed SD too? Sure. I think that would be a fine use of case volume. But if I can only have two, then I feel they must both be full sized. If we're going to hide a slot, then I feel that it needs to be capable of handling the largest, fastest cards on the market - which means full sized SD or CF. CF is physically too big for the device. Full sized SD is just right.


The micro cards, being slower, lower capacity and more expensive make a bad choice for a boot drive.


Where we've come to an argument is whether microSD is adequate to the job. I feel that since microSD is always 12-24 months behind full sized SD cards in capabilities that any device that wants to maximize capabilities should have the full sized slots.


The argument that we should have a 3rd slot in a different and slower format to satisfy the 'go slower' crowd is laughable. I simply don't hear a lot of people screaming, "Make my device slower and with less capacity using more expensive media!" or "It boots too fast! Slow it down!" That is the side of this argument that you two are taking - that you think decreased capacity, slower performance and more expensive is better.


If I could have three full sized full speed SD slots with one of them hidden up behind the battery - great. If I can't, then I'd just as soon have two with one up behind the battery and skip the wasted volume, no matter how small, of having a microSD slot.


Think of it this way.


If you use microSD as your boot drive, you're still going to need a good spec SD card for everything else.


If you use full size SD as your boot drive, add the cost of that microSD card and the good spec SD together and consider a larger,faster full sized SD card for the same as the combined money in the microSD example. Boot from that and run your /swap and programs from it.


Picture a device with an internal full sized full USB 3.0 speed SD slot. You can boot from that, store programs on it, put your /swap file there, even store media that you know you'll always want there - pictures of your family, your must A list, etc...


You will need an SD card slot for additional media files or in some cases to copy data to/from the main card. Why are you convinced that you need two full sized user facing SD card slots? What is the usage case that can not be covered between the internal full sized SD card slot and one external facing full sized SD card slot? IF you can think of that usage scenario - is it rare enough that adding a temporary 3rd slot via a USB 3.0 SD card reader plugged into the back of the unit isn't a viable alternative for that one function where you HAVE to have 3 SD devices at once?


Using current cards as an example...


$89 buys you a Lexar 128GB 133X SDXC card that easily maxes out the current Pandora's read/write speeds.


$70 buys you a Sandisk 64GB microSDXC card that barely maxes out the current Pandora's read/write.


Which one would you rather have mounted internally as your boot, swap, programs and persistent media device? Would the ability to use the larger card as the internal card eliminate the need for one of the exposed slots? Why not? The microSD internal option on this example is too small for what I keep as persistent data on my current Pandora. I may as well superglue my left card slot in - it never gets ejected and may as well be internal to the device.

You can't compare class to class and size to size because microSD has always been slower to market. What you're effectively doing by comparing class to class is comparing today's microSD with last year's full sized SD cards. Look at cards by when they are released - and the best equivalents at that time.

Except if you look at average benchmarks of cards RIGHT NOW, Class 10 microSD cards are coming in at just 1 MB/s slower average random access write vs their full sized counterparts.

If you look at that RIGHT NOW, you are comparing 1 month old microSD cards to 1.5 year old full sized SD cards.

UHS speed microSD cards exist, though I will admit to a greater scarcity, with speeds in the 40-50MB/s sequential reads against the 50-60MB/s full sized card.

UHS speed microSD cards are just starting to appear in review samples - and starting to be seen listed on sites for sale.


UHS speed full sized SD cards have been on the market for a year - and are now up to 60MB/s writes and 90MB/s reads.


If you're going to compare, you MUST compare current tech to current tech. Your examples compare current microSD tech to one year+ old full sized SD tech - which is just being silly and reinforces my argument.


Simply stated: microSD has always been and as far as I can tell will always be 12-24 months behind the capabilities available to full sized SD cards.


Putting a microSD slot in a device is the same as saying, "We wanted to be cool so we put this tiny poorly performing standard in."

I cannot imagine any scenario where that extra 10MB/s which only a small handful will ever even attempt to use is worth crippling the device for the vast majority.

We're NOT just talking 10MB/s. We're talking about:


microSD generally has 50% of the throughput MB/sec of full sized SD of the -same release timeframe-.


microSD generally has 50% of the size in GB of full sized SD of the -same release timeframe-.


microSD generally has 120% of the price per GB of full sized SD of the -same spec-.


So, you claim that the vast majority want a device that purposely limits them to a card format that is 1/2 as fast, half the capacity and 120% of the price of what they could have had with full sized SD slots? And you call having full sized slots, 'crippling the device'?


Please - provide some form of Pandora usage scenario where having a microSD slot is better than having a full sized SD slot in the same position.


Vast majority? Where the heck do you get the idea that the vast majority want to go slower?

 

[anexanhume]

Well, glad we blew right past reasonable expectations like playable Saturn or Dreamcast emulators...