Ram Upgrade In Pandora

[ndsrulz1]

I was looking at some specs of Pandora and it says it has 128Mb of ram in the developer units and 256mb in the retail, that got me thinking, the Pandora uses DDR ram and you could easily buy DDR ram chips and solder them in or replace the one that is on the board. People have done similar things on the xbox:


http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Upgrading_Xbox_RAM_HOWTO


Do you think this is possible on the Pandora?

 

[marshal]

Short answer: not possible

 

[tristan.clark]

I was looking at some specs of Pandora and it says it has 128Mb of ram in the developer units and 256mb in the retail, that got me thinking, the Pandora uses DDR ram and you could easily buy DDR ram chips and solder them in or replace the one that is on the board. People have done similar things on the xbox:

http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Upgrading_Xbox_RAM_HOWTO


Do you think this is possible on the Pandora?


Its not possible as the TI processor is a SoC [System on a Chip], everything is on the one chip or soldered directly on top of that. Any attempt to mod it would mostly likely destroy it.

 

[cb88]

also iirc it isnt' regular DDR it is embedded low power DDR

adding more DDR on board was considered (I or someone else has asked this before.... do a search for it) and it turns out that adding expadable ram would add a LOT more chips onto the board and also greatly reduce battery life

 

[DAP]

I believe that 256 MB is the maximum amount of RAM that the processor can handle.

Yes, it is a system on a chip and it is a stacked set of ball grid arrays, but it IS possible to disassemble them, put new balls on the parts and reassemble them. It's just not easy, and you need special equipment.

So yes it is not possible, but the reason given was the wrong one.

 

[cb88]

It can handle more via enable lines externally from the SoC but i don`t remember where the exact specs are i thnk MWeston cleared that up when i asked awhile back... in the dev forum iirc

I think up to 1Gb on SoC + 1Gb is possible to add externally if you have the appopriate interfacing HW which isn't built on the pandora board
CODE
http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/omap3530.html


CODE
External Memory Interfaces:
* SDRAM Controller (SDRC)
o 16, 32-bit Memory Controller With 1G-Byte Total Address Space
o Interfaces to Low-Power Double Data Rate (LPDDR) SDRAM
o SDRAM Memory Scheduler (SMS) and Rotation Engine
* General Purpose Memory Controller (GPMC)
o 16-bit Wide Multiplexed Address/Data Bus
o Up to 8 Chip Select Pins With 128M-Byte Address Space per Chip Select Pin
o Glueless Interface to NOR Flash, NAND Flash (With ECC Hamming Code Calculation), SRAM and Pseudo-SRAM


take that with a grain of salt until someone that actually knows can explain it or has a fast enough internet connection to find the post where it was explained

The Pandora has 256Mb ram and 512 Flash.. period end of story and at 256Mb it is a HUGE amount for an embedded device

Edit: extensively edited by me

 

[tristan.clark]

I believe that 256 MB is the maximum amount of RAM that the processor can handle.

Yes, it is a system on a chip and it is a stacked set of ball grid arrays, but it IS possible to disassemble them, put new balls on the parts and reassemble them. It's just not easy, and you need special equipment.

So yes it is not possible, but the reason given was the wrong one.

Ok. thanks for the update

 

[cb88]

uuuhh.. maybe you missed it but it can handle 1Gb on chip not 256Mb of course the fact is ... it has 256Mb from the factory so maybe that is what he ment... it isn't upgradeable you have to buy it with 1GB to get 1Gb etc...

 

[Kramy]

There probably isn't enough space on the board for 8 DDR chips. Unless you want to lose another feature, be happy with 256MB.

Remember, this is an efficient linux OS. You're not going to lose half of it to the OS.

 

[WizardStan]

Do you think this is possible on the Pandora?
More important question: Why do you think you would want to? We haven't seen anything that would even remotely suggest that the existing 256 MB will not be enough. In fact, since I believe most of the dev boards that we've seen demoed have 128 MB on chip (though that may have changed when I wasn't paying attention) we actually haven't seen anything that would even remotely suggest that 128 MB will not be enough. More memory is only good if you know what to use it for, and even then only if there's no other choice. Adding more memory for the sake of having more memory is just being wasteful.

 

[urjaman]

In short: 256MB is enough.
Longer version:
In linux, the more free (not used by applications) RAM you have, the more disk cache you have, so in theory more RAM is nearly always better (for speed), but i can't think of anything you would want to do on the pandora for which 256M is not enough.

Example: I once had a Pentium 200 as a "holiday computer" (at my summer retreat) with 256M of SDRAM (motherboard design maximum) and i used Damn-Small-Linux loaded entirely to ram on it (it would load the image and settings from hd on boot and store them on shutdown). It could do essentially all i needed - play internet radio, do IM (irc,msn), run firefox (although it takes a _moment_ to load), dillo (for simpler sites and faster browsing). I very rarely hit the ram limit of the system - overusing firefox's tabbed browsing was really the only time that happened (and that was _lots_ of tabs).

 

[MadDog]

In short: 256MB is enough.

100% Agree, I have a zoom1 dev kit here with 128megs! And our 3D SatNav app draws hell of a lot on screen. Draws out to 2k with full terrain, fog lighting and road network. And the OMap3 does it without braking a sweet. I don't know how much ram we are using but I know if it was swapping to the SD card it would be a lot slower than the 20+ FPS we are getting.

 

[Tor]

My Nokia tablet (a very similar device) has 128MB RAM. I also have 128MB swap enabled. Normally I have about 3 programs running at the same time (browser, email program, rss reader), but the browser may have several windows open and there's also some 6-8 applets running (weather, gmail notifier, google chat, clock, internet radio, fm radio, and a couple more). Plus the usual set of Linux daemons running in the background. Now and then I start a gps/mapping program, or duke nukem, or something else. I don't have to shut down any of my other programs when I do.

With this setup my swap is practically empty (as checked with 'free'). In fact I haven't had swap space set up at all for most of the time I have owned the device. I definitely don't need it because the device is short of RAM, it's only for 'just in case' situations.

I think the 256MB on the Pandora will be ample.

 

[fiveseven]

If there _were_ to be more RAM, I'm sure someone would find a way to use it, even if only for bragging rights (that said, 256 sounds fine to me).
Problem is, from what I hear, it's damn near impossible to upgrade the RAM without some very expensive equipment.

 

[Chip]

Problem is, from what I hear, it's damn near impossible to upgrade the RAM without some very expensive equipment.
It IS impossible. Once the RAM is attached to the OMAP PoP, it canot be removed by any non-destructive means. Once the OMAP is attached to the board, it is cheaper and easier to replace the entire board than to replace the OMAP PoP assembly.

The RAM is not removable, not replaceable, and not upgradable.

 

[Squidge]

It IS impossible. Once the RAM is attached to the OMAP PoP, it canot be removed by any non-destructive means.

For a home user, yes (same as any standard BGA work). For those with the equipment and knowledge, no.

For example, at work we have a few people that can remove bga chips from boards (we repair them under warranty for other companies) and that includes those in a PoP format. They can then be reballed and replaced, or, more commonly, thrown away and replaced. For that job we use a combination of gas and nitrogen. Temperature has to be very accurately controlled to prevent damage to the board and other components around those being replaced.

Replacing the RAM would would take a while, but since you don't care about saving it, you just have to be careful not to damage the omap (which includes the solder balls underneath), but it could be done.

 

[MWeston]

We did swap five boards with 256MB parts back when we got them. I think the old processor and ram were scrapped in the process (possibly stored for future re-balling). It's not a cheap task (especially if processor is scrapped) and one of the boards died in the process and has never worked since.

Also, I don't think POP memory larger than 256MB exists yet. That could be a ways off and if it does get made, I'm sure I will try it on a few boards for fun. I don't expect it before Q3 2009 if it is in any memory manufacturer's roadmap.

 

[Alec]

Heheh, checked my memory usage on my laptop, with a full-blown KDE4 desktop running, and I only use 12% of my memory for application data. That's 245 MB

 

[chole]

I have an old Pentium 266 laptop at home. KDE 3.x (I think it was 3.2) worked without going into swap (just) with 96MB RAM, and I think it even worked (horribly) with 48MB RAM.

I would have loved 512MB RAM, but the jump up to 256MB was enough to move me from "eventual get depending on end-user reviews" to "preorder".

 

[Squidge]

I think the original question has been answered sufficiently - it's extremely unlikely that anyone will upgrade the RAM on the Pandora due to the points already raised.