Ram Poll.

[Nardella]

sdsssddds

Good point!

 

[DrHAX]

sdsssddds

Good point!

I wish this forum had a middle finger emoticon at times...

 

[rygD]

sdsssddds

Good point!

I wish this forum had a middle finger emoticon at times...

I thought posts served that purpose.

 

[Grench]

At time of posting exactly 50% of voters voted for 4GB or more. 

My guess 50% of the voters won't get what they wanted.

Are you two talking about the first section of the poll, where you can pick multiple answers?  50% of the votes (which is not current) may not be 50% of the voters.  It could be half the voters, but I don't have time/patience to check that.

I'm just being snarky, don't put any effort in trying to find anything meaningful in what I'm saying here.

While we're analyzing this...

The 50 people who voted for 4GB and the 16 people who voted for 8GB, being 66 in total, outnumber the 54 people who voted for 2GB and 3 who voted for 1GB, totaling 57.

Since there has yet to be any evidence that the OMAP5 SoC can actually keep up with any set of applications utilizing more than 1.5GB of RAM, the 2GB is already 'overkill'.  In fact, the evidence to date has been that 2GB of RAM on the Pyra is 'a lot'.

This goes to show that voting is often a popularity contest based on hype and misinformation.  Someone has to say it - the 4GB and 8GB crowds are either misinformed or fools or both.

Anyone voting for 4GB clearly does not understand how much RAM 2GB really is - or how valuable standby time really is.  Being able to close the lid on the Pandora, drop it in a jacket pocket then open it up several days later to continue from where you left off with very little battery loss, and no fear that it would die in the meantime, is a BIG deal.  Going from 2GB to 4GB nearly halves the standby time while providing -no- benefit.  Some day on a future faster SoC with even more cores, then more than 2GB might make sense.  Right now, with the OMAP5, 2GB is more than it's realistically going to be able to actively use.  At 2GB the restriction is not the RAM, but the speed of the SoC itself.

The 16 people voting for 8GB clearly have intentions of running 64bit Windows 10 and multiple X86 VMs.  There is no helping these individuals.
 

 

[rygD]

I voted for 1, 2, 4, and 8...  I am probably misinformed, a fool, AND trying to go with the popular choice.

 

[Grench]

I voted for 1, 2, 4, and 8...  I am probably misinformed, a fool, AND trying to go with the popular choice.

Naw - you're just a joiner.  
 

 

[rygD]

I voted for 1, 2, 4, and 8...  I am probably misinformed, a fool, AND trying to go with the popular choice.

Naw - you're just a joiner.  
 

I didn't join the "Don't care" club, which is odd because for most things I don't care.  I care with this, but only for what will really be done by others and myself (which is not X86 Windows VMs, but I would like to try it since it keeps getting brought up).

What I wonder is if there is some reason when 8GB would be practical with OMAP5.  Why support it if it can never be used?  I am not talking about in the Pyra, as we plan to use it, just in general.  Some people have given scenarios where more than 2GB might be used with the Pyra (don't think anyone has given anything where it is needed), but are there other uses where that much RAM is ideal and useful, if not required?

 

[Neelix]

While we're analyzing this...

The 50 people who voted for 4GB and the 16 people who voted for 8GB, being 66 in total, outnumber the 54 people who voted for 2GB and 3 who voted for 1GB, totaling 57.

Except that since it was a multiple choice poll you can't add the groups together like this because they overlap.

URGH!   this poll software is even worse than the previous version.   Not only is it calculating percentages based on total "votes"  rather than the number of voters, it no longer seems to even show the number of voters so working out the correct percentages is going to be somewhat akin to pulling teeth... 

-Neelix

 

[Grench]

Don't you hate it when a 'software upgrade' is so bad that you have to search for a competing alternative?

BBS software wtf?  2AM BBS (early 90s ASCI BBS software) was better than this.

 

[bzar]

When making the decision one not only has to consider the practical aspects but also marketing. Will enough people looking at the specs when first encountering the Pyra be more likely to make a purchase if it says XGB RAM (also noting the cost and battery life). Will enough people be swayed by this decision to make the increase in RAM profitable.I suspect that people will certainly pay more attention to a device that has 4GB of ram even if the cost is higher and the battery life lower.

Technical considerations should come before any marketing ones. Making technical decisions based on marketing potential only results in bad products that sell well for a short while to the impulse-buy crowd.

I suspect that people will want to know how much higher the cost is and how much lower the battery life is.

I understand your viewpoint here, thinking "Why do all these people want to hold Pyra back by limiting its RAM?". In this case it's kinda like you went car shopping and decided to get a cargo truck on the off chance you might need to transport elephants. Sure, it costs more and has worse fuel efficiency, but at least you can haul more stuff. This doesn't change the fact that you're very unlikely to ever need the transport capacity, but will always suffer from the worse efficiency.

 

[thatgui]

Google announced the Nexus 5X with only 2GB RAM. If Google is "allowed" to do that without getting whipped publicly, there may be an off chance that a mobile device with only 2GB RAM isn't "so early 2010ish"

 

[Nardella]

I just went back through this thread and read about a test that TrashyMG ran. Looks like 4GB would be completely useless. Also halving the standby time? I don't care if half the standby time is a week that is still going to be a significant loss!

I guess part of the reason that 4GB seems like a good idea to me is that I am used to an 8GB PC running out and a 3GB phone running low (never runs out because of the way memory is managed but I still get slowdowns. This is usually just doing web browsing, instant messaging and document editing.

I don't think that having 4GB will just affect the sales immediately after release, I think it will be a long lasting effect.

 

[_wb_]

I just bought a nice ARM-based Chromebook (to run Debian on it, of course, though this ChromeOS thing is kind of nice for web browsing). It has an NVIDIA Tegra K1, which is a Cortex-A15 just like the Pyra will be.

It has 4GB of RAM. You can buy this laptop with either 2GB or 4GB of RAM, and I picked the 4GB model.

Now when I look at how it is configured by default, I was a bit surprised to find out that it seemed to have only 2GB of RAM. I wondered where the other 2GB went.

Turns out only 2GB of RAM is used as RAM on this machine, and the other 2GB is used only as a zram swap partition. Nice idea -- maybe on the Pyra we could also use part of the RAM as a zram swap partition by default (e.g. 1.5GB RAM, 0.5GB swap).

My point is: even on this full-sized laptop (OK, it's "only" a chromebook, but still, it's a pretty nice machine), 2GB of RAM is enough. I'm using ChromeOS and a Debian chroot at the same time, and while ChromeOS can eat quite a lot of RAM (it's processes fill the top-5 of memory users, then number 6 is Xorg and then the rest of the top-10 is more chrome processes), Debian doesn't have a big memory footprint at all.

 

[TrashyMG]

I just went back through this thread and read about a test that TrashyMG ran. Looks like 4GB would be completely useless. 

Well I'm not even sure I proved that fully, there may be some application that consumes a bit of memory without eating up all the CPU cycles. Just not sure what that would be, I'm open for some ideas, I know some may suggest VMs, but they are a bit of setup and I'm not sure I'll get to any time soon.

 

[comradekingu]

When making the decision one not only has to consider the practical aspects but also marketing. Will enough people looking at the specs when first encountering the Pyra be more likely to make a purchase if it says XGB RAM (also noting the cost and battery life). Will enough people be swayed by this decision to make the increase in RAM profitable.I suspect that people will certainly pay more attention to a device that has 4GB of ram even if the cost is higher and the battery life lower.

Technical considerations should come before any marketing ones. Making technical decisions based on marketing potential only results in bad products that sell well for a short while to the impulse-buy crowd.

I suspect that people will want to know how much higher the cost is and how much lower the battery life is.

I understand your viewpoint here, thinking "Why do all these people want to hold Pyra back by limiting its RAM?". In this case it's kinda like you went car shopping and decided to get a cargo truck on the off chance you might need to transport elephants. Sure, it costs more and has worse fuel efficiency, but at least you can haul more stuff. This doesn't change the fact that you're very unlikely to ever need the transport capacity, but will always suffer from the worse efficiency.

Real roads take a while to go from horse-cart to speedway, so your analogy breaks. Consider actual use.

The battery is already huge, much bigger than comparable products of similar or bigger screen size. 4GB of ram is already offered in many other such products. I don't imagine it gets used a whole lot in those, but this is different. We are the heaviest users, and we don't shelve devices for fashionable effect.

Yes to more numbers and rational decisions, but lets look at me, the user.

I both want to not be worried about battery life, nor  running out of ram. The last time i had 2GB total was over 10 years ago. That is a computer to me, or it was if you will. Regardless that increasing level of performance is where i want to put the bar. 10 years ago i had a flac audio player in my phone, that was cool, now I want a laptop that isn't as inconvenient as my current laptop, in my phone, that is a gaming device, that I can use along with my photography.
To get there, some smaller (compared to total price) cost is added to gain more ram, meaning I can keep the device feeling modern and functioning without trouble, for longer.

 

[Nardella]

What about gimp with many layers? 3D modeling with textures?

 

[Grench]

When making the decision one not only has to consider the practical aspects but also marketing. Will enough people looking at the specs when first encountering the Pyra be more likely to make a purchase if it says XGB RAM (also noting the cost and battery life). Will enough people be swayed by this decision to make the increase in RAM profitable.I suspect that people will certainly pay more attention to a device that has 4GB of ram even if the cost is higher and the battery life lower.

Technical considerations should come before any marketing ones. Making technical decisions based on marketing potential only results in bad products that sell well for a short while to the impulse-buy crowd.I suspect that people will want to know how much higher the cost is and how much lower the battery life is.I understand your viewpoint here, thinking "Why do all these people want to hold Pyra back by limiting its RAM?". In this case it's kinda like you went car shopping and decided to get a cargo truck on the off chance you might need to transport elephants. Sure, it costs more and has worse fuel efficiency, but at least you can haul more stuff. This doesn't change the fact that you're very unlikely to ever need the transport capacity, but will always suffer from the worse efficiency.

Real roads take a while to go from horse-cart to speedway, so your analogy breaks. Consider actual use.

The battery is already huge, much bigger than comparable products of similar or bigger screen size. 4GB of ram is already offered in many other such products. I don't imagine it gets used a whole lot in those, but this is different. We are the heaviest users, and we don't shelve devices for fashionable effect.

Yes to more numbers and rational decisions, but lets look at me, the user.

I both want to not be worried about battery life, nor  running out of ram. The last time i had 2GB total was over 10 years ago. That is a computer to me, or it was if you will. Regardless that increasing level of performance is where i want to put the bar. 10 years ago i had a flac audio player in my phone, that was cool, now I want a laptop that isn't as inconvenient as my current laptop, in my phone, that is a gaming device, that I can use along with my photography.
To get there, some smaller (compared to total price) cost is added to gain more ram, meaning I can keep the device feeling modern and functioning without trouble, for longer.

The buying a truck instead of a car analogy is, actually, quite perfect.

CK - you state that we should, "Consider actual use."  Then you go into an irrational and unrelated discourse about your past hardware.  What is the, "actual use," that we should consider that you can point to that requires more than 2GB of RAM on the Pyra?
 

 

[Nardella]

Or gimp with 16MP images and a couple layers.

 

[bzar]

Real roads take a while to go from horse-cart to speedway, so your analogy breaks. Consider actual use.

The battery is already huge, much bigger than comparable products of similar or bigger screen size. 4GB of ram is already offered in many other such products. I don't imagine it gets used a whole lot in those, but this is different. We are the heaviest users, and we don't shelve devices for fashionable effect.

Yes to more numbers and rational decisions, but lets look at me, the user.

I both want to not be worried about battery life, nor  running out of ram. The last time i had 2GB total was over 10 years ago. That is a computer to me, or it was if you will. Regardless that increasing level of performance is where i want to put the bar. 10 years ago i had a flac audio player in my phone, that was cool, now I want a laptop that isn't as inconvenient as my current laptop, in my phone, that is a gaming device, that I can use along with my photography.
To get there, some smaller (compared to total price) cost is added to gain more ram, meaning I can keep the device feeling modern and functioning without trouble, for longer.

I was comparing to cars of equal technology built for different uses. I don't see how horse-carts and speedways factor into this.

All I'm saying is we might want to get the actual cost (not just the monetary either) of the extra RAM before forming any opinions. As I see it you agree. I'd like to have everything too, but that might not be possible.

CPU requirements tend to increase with memory requirements, which is kind of sensible because the more data you have, the more data you generally process. This isn't a strong rule though and individual counterexamples are easy to come up with. But so far there hasn't really been an application shown that was constrained by the amount of RAM instead of CPU power. Even multitasking heavily hasn't shown signs of this.


Nardella: Gimp with 16MP images and a couple of layers. Let's assume 32bit color (RGBA). With raw bitmap data that's (16Mpix * 4B/pix =) 64MiB per layer. You'd need 16 layers just to fill 1GiB. Some operations and undo and such may momentarily use more. Can't really say.

EDIT: Actually 17 layers, if the Mpix is in megapixels and the memory is in gibibytes. 1000 vs 1024 and all.

 

[comradekingu]

Maybe i took it too far, but it makes sense. A car you build will eventually get outdated.

In the world of computers, you are always building a horse when you know in a few years modern cars will be a thing.
And it is possible to do more things, its not ideal, but still. Its equivalent to having a bigger petrol tank/battery vs the cost of having to lug it around.

Who does just one thing, when i use GIMP i got about 5 images i work on, give or take? Ive sometimes had 500 tabs in my browser, and a second browser on the side.

Id gladly pay a premium for 8GB, which is how that makes sense to offer. However a baseline 4GB (as opposed to 2GB) is a value-adding perposition to offset the total cost of the device.

The pandora had its ram upjusted in planning, and then a few times over in production. Re-buying the whole thing sucks, but knowingly supporting and having minimum nuisance is good.

So since the ram is on the moduleboard, having one thats cheap enough at 4 and one thats quite expensive at 8 makes sense. Much less sending back and forth, and just as much up-sell.

* Having more things to sell, leveraging different price ranges
* Moving the baseline up a bit so that top dollar people wont have to suffer by artificially limited software.