The Future of Pyra's CPU


The M1 is almost certainly a very good chip at doing the sort of AppleMac things it needs to do; previous apple cores that went into iPhones were geared towards the kind of things iOS wants to do. How different that is to things that linux users and gamers want to do is debatable. But it'd be kind of an abstract debate at best because there's no way in hell that Apple will supply one of their chips for the Pyra.
 
matzesu said:
I wonder if this Apple M1 Chip would work ?,
Its quite hyped now, allthough its nothing new for us that an ARM Prozessor may be a good idea..
Click to expand...

Apple is likely not selling their chips to anyone outside their consumer products
 
The fault of the current CPU which makes suspend unusable really bothers me. I still want a Pyra but this is a pretty major downside. I hope there will be a future CPU and I hope that it will not be Intel (if it's Intel then I might just keep using the old one).
 
Ah ok, makes sense, allthough i would sugesst there is much less free documentation about the M1 for Hardware Defs other than Apple as whe had whit the Omap 5..
Also the M1 got a Fan in the Macbook which was pretty silent, but its there..

But whe Pandora/Pyra Peaple know that ARM are allready cool, long bevore Apple came up whit the M1
 
Phlyra said:
Maybe a RISC-V based upgrade could indeed be more likely in future:
www.techradar.com

Here comes the most formidable rival to the Raspberry Pi yet

Powered by an open source RISC-V-based processor
www.techradar.com www.techradar.com

technode.com

China's chipmakers could use RISC-V to reduce impact of US sanctions · TechNode

There is growing interest from China's semiconductor sector in the open-source instruction-set architecture.
technode.com technode.com
Click to expand...

I love RISC-V, it is a free¹/libre¹ ISA/architecture, but obviously RISC-V is far from ready to be used in a device like Pyra. Even Linux is fresh on it, and there is no RISC-V SOC with GPU and other components a device like Pyra would need. It will take years until RISC-V be an option for Pyra.

So there is no doubt: the CPU upgrade will be ARM, there is no other option.

¹: RISC-V ISA is free/libre, but it is so free that it lets you build totally open CPU or totally closed, even you can modify ISA for your needs (modify or expand as you wish). In other words: most RISC-V CPUs would be closed (partially or totally). A lot of RISC-V CPU will be invisible (you won't know it is there; for example in WD disk/SSD). Only a small fraction of RISC-V CPU would be open-minded. But even in this way it will be wonderful.
 
matzesu said:
Also the M1 got a Fan in the Macbook which was pretty silent, but its there..

But whe Pandora/Pyra Peaple know that ARM are allready cool, long bevore Apple came up whit the M1
Click to expand...

Apple M1 got a fan in Macbook Pro but M1 got NO fan in Macbook Air, so M1 Air is totally silent.

On other side Apple doesn't design nor sell hard for other, its chips are designed only for Apple products. And M1 is a chip for notebooks and small desktops, not for hanhelds/pocket computers like Pyra. Pyra would need a SOC more like those used in mobile devices, smartphones.

I am happy because Apple created M1 and showed a notebook computer with ARM CPU/SOC can be equal or better¹ than an x86 CPU. I hope that be a model for people in PC industry (except Intel/AMD), following Apple in some way, so we can have good ARM PC in a future. I know it won't be easy because Windows success is attached to x86 architecture, but it would go very good for PC to have other option, not only x86.

¹: Who read on ARM history will know ARM CPU was initially designed for desktop computers, as a replacement for old 6502 (Acorn engineers looked all available options on CPU market, and none was good enough so they decided to design its own CPU). And first commercial ARM CPU was used in Acorn Archimedes, a computer more advanced than PC of those days in lots of aspects but failed to get a big share because market was dominated by Intel/Microsoft.
 
And what are the differences between the Pyra and a Notebook?
This is important for me as I want the Pyra for Notebook tasks ..
no picture or movie editing, just a bit Office and Internet stuff..



Send from something, i guess ^^
 
matzesu said:
And what are the differences between the Pyra and a Notebook?
Click to expand...

1st/ Obviously size (good point it is small, bad point small keyboard and screen), as Pyra is a pocket computer. But you can connect big keyboard/mouse and monitor for use in home when attached, and in this way you can use it like a desktop computer replacement.

2nd/ About performance I don't see a problem as you will run a Linux OS (Debian) with a light desktop GUI and you won't have tons of spyware a normal Android smartphone has.

And a professional computer from x years ago had no more power than Pyra, and you worked with them.

Where I think you will notice is in storage speed/performance. A modern notebook can have SSD In M.2 form and this is much faster than SD cards and SD interface in Pyra. But on other side, x yeas ago we used slow mechanical disks maybe slower than Pyra SD.

It may be that if you load a big program like LibreOffice you will notice it loads slower than in a modern M.2 SSD in a notebook.

The best part of Pyra is that it can go in your pocket, really (GPD Win was too much big to be considered pocket size seriously), and it uses a standard desktop GUI so you can work like in a computer. This is contrary to Android smartphones where you don't have a real desktop GUI (all windows you want, mouse use, etc) and most applications are designed to be used in only touch mode and you don't have resizable and reubicable windows/etc.

For example my high end (when it was released) Android smartphone has a HDMI output option so I can connect to monitor and TV, BUT I CAN'T use it as a computer because it doesn't have a real GUI, and most apps are not designed to be used with keyboard+mouse.
 
oskda said:
For example my high end (when it was released) Android smartphone has a HDMI output option so I can connect to monitor and TV, BUT I CAN'T use it as a computer because it doesn't have a real GUI, and most apps are not designed to be used with keyboard+mouse.
Click to expand...
Dunno what you've done to your phone, but usally they have a real GUI. Shitty if you expect more than a toddler would, but still very real and very goo(f)y.
 
levi said:
Different people have different expectations when it comes to qualifying a GUI with the word 'real'.
Click to expand...

I think I didn't explain it correctly. When I write GUI I refer to desktop GUI, classical GUI, the GUI invented at Xerox (used in Alto, Smalltalk, etc) and later copied by Apple/MS Windows, i.e. a GUI with REAL windows you can resize/overlap/etc, and other elements.

A touch smartphone includes a post-WIN GUI, an interface totally different from desktop GUI.

For example you can have various apps on screen on same cases but without the freedom and possibilities you have in a desktop GUI with its windowing system.
 
I think the term you're searching for is desktop environment. GUI usually refers to a single program, not the environment it is running within.
 
Djoga'Ro said:
Dunno what you've done to your phone, but usally they have a real GUI. Shitty if you expect more than a toddler would, but still very real and very goo(f)y.
Click to expand...

I have just explained to other user: when I said GUI I refer to desktop GUI, a GUI with full windows interface, usually used with a mouse.

Post-WIMP GUIs used in modern touch interface smartphones are totally different.

PD: I use the term GUI withoutbother addons to refer to desktop (WIMP) GUI because itvwas used so during decades (post-WIMP GUIs are much later design).
 
Letalis Sonus said:
I think the term you're searching for is desktop environment. GUI usually refers to a single program, not the environment it is running within.
Click to expand...

GUI of a desktop environment, or desktop GUI. Obviously that GUI is used with a mouse/etc, underlying SO/etc.
 
Guys, a GUI is anything that provides visuals to a program or action. Stop this nonsense about "real GUIs" or "desktop GUIs" and use specific terms for what you are discussing. If you are wanting windows, then say that you want windows. (or a windowing system, or a window manager) There's no point here in arguing over a vague term like GUI that can be applied to pretty much anything.

-God Ginrai
 
Do I recall completely wrong when I seem to recall that the Pandora was of loose relation to the Beagleboard?
Well, now there's this: https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/20...-single-board-computer-designed-to-run-linux/

Unfortunately, it has a SOC clearly meant for non-gaming, but I'd personally find it quite cool... "if only, but then again maybe not", because for the Pyra there's so many wasted transistors in that SOC and also due to the wasted ones a glaring omission (though there could be Hope with regards to that):
"One obvious item missing from the specifications is a GPU, and I was told while the first batch scheduled in March will be GPU less, but the next batch – slated to be manufactured in September – will come with an Imagination Technologies GPU." (https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/0...are-risc-v-linux-sbc-targets-ai-applications/)

(Also: Imagination... *sigh*... so it would realistically be supported with a current kernel for a couple of years and then it's obsolete...)

Well obviously another issue would be the ISA would be different then, but I would not mind that personally.
But, again, personally with the Pandora, I only ever used the GPU features a couple of times: none of the software I was interested in actually used it so it was just "for testing". The huge majority of the emulation stuff simply used the framebuffer directly via SDL and in my own environment I actually just let things draw stuff on top of X!

Well, anyways, it would be kind of nice to have another hobbyist-friendly platform with the same chip, I think that would be even more important that a super-hyper-ultra-fast CPU.
 
MrConfusion said:
"One obvious item missing from the specifications is a GPU, and I was told while the first batch scheduled in March will be GPU less, but the next batch – slated to be manufactured in September – will come with an Imagination Technologies GPU." (https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/0...are-risc-v-linux-sbc-targets-ai-applications/)

(Also: Imagination... *sigh*... so it would realistically be supported with a current kernel for a couple of years and then it's obsolete...)
Click to expand...
Why’s that? Does Imagination only support their chips for two years per generation?

I wonder whether this kills the PicoRio?
 
Phlyra said:
Why’s that? Does Imagination only support their chips for two years per generation?
Click to expand...
Imagination does not provide chips, they provide chip (GPU) designs to others who make chips. And those provide some SoC-support-package with some glued together kernel driver, sometimes with source code. The issue is that we as the open source community therefore have no access to documentation to maintain kernel drivers. This was already the case with the OMAP processors and others (Intel GMA500, GMA3600, Ingenic jz4780, some Samsung and Allwinner SoC). There is a project which tries to improve this situation but it is more challenging than Mount Everest: https://github.com/openpvrsgx-devgroup/linux_openpvrsgx/wiki
 
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