The Pyra is crying!

[zero9zero]

Whoo hoo, cant wait for the pyra, keep up the good work guys, awesome to see such a powerful, unique and versatile device in the making.

 

[thatgui]

That's just a placeholder. We'll use whatever chip makes most sense (price / capacity) when it's time for the mass production.

At least 8GB, but probably 16GB, I guess.

Thats a relief, based on the E-mails from the "meddlesome" sales guy in the support system, I was worried you would go the 4GB route.
A "Awesome" from me, for making another "baby" step to success. Another "Awesome" for keeping us in a rather "tight" loop

 

[Bosbeetle]

 

[Da Dude]

Great news ED.

 

[ashcloud]

Awesome progress!

I'm confuesd about the pictures. There seem to be two micro-SD card slots on the boards. I thought it was supposed to have one such slot and it would only be useable when disabling the soldered flash chip. What are these for?

edit: lol, typo ^^

 

[Grench]

One thing no one's mentioned so far is that the fully populated PCB also has eMMC chip P/N H26M31001HPR, which has a 4GB capacity


ED, can you comment on if this is the chip that will be used for Pyra at release or if it's just a placeholder for testing? And has anything been done to validate it, or is that impossible w/o the RAM?

That's just a placeholder. We'll use whatever chip makes most sense (price / capacity) when it's time for the mass production.


At least 8GB, but probably 16GB, I guess.

Suggestion:  

1.  Find the fastest 8GB chip that is readily available.  This should be the 'baseline'.

2.  Find the cost difference between that very fast 8GB chip and a 16GB chip of equal speed and determine if that increase in costs is acceptable.

For the internal NAND, size beyond 8GB is nice, but not necessary.  The primary advantage the NAND has over the microSD is the speeds in excess of 104MB/s that it is theoretically capable of attaining.

Looking forward to it - keep these updates coming!

 

[Slacker]

1.  Find the fastest 8GB chip that is readily available.  This should be the 'baseline'.

2.  Find the cost difference between that very fast 8GB chip and a 16GB chip of equal speed and determine if that increase in costs is acceptable.

For the internal NAND, size beyond 8GB is nice, but not necessary.  The primary advantage the NAND has over the microSD is the speeds in excess of 104MB/s that it is theoretically capable of attaining.

Screw that. 30MB/s or so is good enough for a system drive as far as sequential access speed goes. What's more important is random access IOPS. Is the production NAND chip chosen already, and if so, were there any benchmarks done on that?

 

[rygD]

 

I assume when the ram is attached and it boots, that's when preorders start?

I was going to make a stupid joke about hooves, not boots, but then I found out there are boots for hooves.  Then I found out there are boots that are hooves for human rams, or something.  Then I looked at your picture.  Why can't making jokes be simple.



 

 

1.  Find the fastest 8GB chip that is readily available.  This should be the 'baseline'.
2.  Find the cost difference between that very fast 8GB chip and a 16GB chip of equal speed and determine if that increase in costs is acceptable.
 
For the internal NAND, size beyond 8GB is nice, but not necessary.  The primary advantage the NAND has over the microSD is the speeds in excess of 104MB/s that it is theoretically capable of attaining.

Screw that. 30MB/s or so is good enough for a system drive as far as sequential access speed goes. What's more important is random access IOPS. Is the production NAND chip chosen already, and if so, were there any benchmarks done on that?

I think Grench is asking for faster because the user always has the option of higher capacity through microSD.  I think I agree with him.

 

[Slacker]

I think Grench is asking for faster because the user always has the option of higher capacity through microSD.  I think I agree with him.

I'm asking for faster too! The question is which faster? I'm arguing that for a system drive, sequential speed is irrelevant. You want IOPS over all else.

 

[rygD]

I think Grench is asking for faster because the user always has the option of higher capacity through microSD.  I think I agree with him.

I'm asking for faster too! The question is which faster? I'm arguing that for a system drive, sequential speed is irrelevant. You want IOPS over all else.

I need to learn to read, too.  

 

[TrashyMG]

Playing around on the Devboard, 8GB works for a standard install and a healthy amount development tools... It will be tight however for those that want to 'apt-get install' just anything they want to install. With the 16GB SD card on my Devboard, I feel I have room to install a bit of non-essential things from the debian repository and have plenty of room.

 

[WizardStan]

I'm arguing that for a system drive, sequential speed is irrelevant. You want IOPS over all else.

That is a good point, although to be fair there is a correlation between sequential reads and IOPS: if you get something that can read a single file fast odds are good that it can also hit multiple files and vice versa. Not strictly, of course, but generally a good marker.

 

[Grench]

The Pyra will have two options for a boot device.  You can boot from either/or but cannot access both during the same session.

1.  Soldered in NAND on the eMMC port.  The eMMC port is theoretically capable of 208MB/s.  Yes, IOPS is important too.  The faster, more modern eMMC parts should be better at both than the older ones that use previous versions of the port standard (104MB/s, 52MB/s etc...).

2.  User installed microSD card.  The microSD port is theoretically capable of 104 MB/s.  It is possible to purchase relatively inexpensive 128GB microSD cards that claim close to the port limit in speed.

The faster capabilities of the eMMC can only be exploited at build.  If someone prefers size over speed, they are welcome to install a high capacity microSD card.

So, after a 'comfortable minimum size' is determined for the eMMC (8GB or 16GB - leaning more towards 16GB), the fastest readily available eMMC of that size for this part should be found and evaluated.

Either method, eMMC or microSD is capable of large size.  Only the eMMC is capable of insane speed - but that speed can only be realized if the part is selected and installed during production.

Sizing the NAND...

4GB should be 'possible' but not particularly 'good' with apt-get capabilities.

8GB should work OK for OS and some apt-get, but I could see it rapidly becoming a limiting factor.  Not a show stopper since we can install larger microSD cards, but a bit more space would be good.

16GB should be adequate ongoing and is a bit of a 'sweet spot' where it is adequate for OS and pretty much any/all applications that someone is likely to want to install via apt-get - and have room for a /swap if anyone really needs one.

32GB+ gets expensive - very expensive for fast 32GB+ chips - arguably for no real reason since the microSD can handle these use cases.  Frankly, this is overkill for nearly all use cases.  Remember, this device also has TWO full sized SD slots for storage.

In all of the above NAND cases, storage/media files (music, video, ROMs, VM drive files, etc.) are assumed to be on media in the SD card slots.

 

[levi]

As long as the Micro SD slot isn't broken in some way, I'd suggest that should be the route for anyone wanting to apt-get install any significant amount of stuff.  I installed the Pandora OS to an SD card, because I thought I might want to opkg install loads of stuff, but it turns out people PND up anything and everything I can think of, so I've not actually installed anything extra to it.

Perhaps users of alternative OSes might want more space if they want to reimage the device though, I suppose.  But for anyone using the community supplied Debian OS, if they want to hack loads of stuff on top, they might have to spend a few dollars on a micro SD card.

 

[Grench]

Which is why I would rather have a blazing fast 8 or 16 GB eMMC NAND than a slower than microSD 256GB NAND.

Speed, capacity, lower-cost.  Choose any 2.

I'm willing to give up capacity for speed and lower-cost.

 

[Alperoot]

Can some translate all these into English? I really don't know hardware language (don't know much English as well)

 

[fusion_power]

Screw that. 30MB/s or so is good enough for a system drive as far as sequential access speed goes. What's more important is random access IOPS. Is the production NAND chip chosen already, and if so, were there any benchmarks done on that?

 Sounds like M.2 /SATA3 POWER!

 

Source: http://www.tweakpc.de/hardware/tests/ssd/samsung_sm951_m2/s05.php

Samsung SM951 M.2 in that case, over 1.5GB/s write and 2.2GB read speed are nice values, DO WANT! ^^

 

[_wb_]

As long as the Micro SD slot isn't broken in some way, I'd suggest that should be the route for anyone wanting to apt-get install any significant amount of stuff.  I installed the Pandora OS to an SD card, because I thought I might want to opkg install loads of stuff, but it turns out people PND up anything and everything I can think of, so I've not actually installed anything extra to it.

Perhaps users of alternative OSes might want more space if they want to reimage the device though, I suppose.  But for anyone using the community supplied Debian OS, if they want to hack loads of stuff on top, they might have to spend a few dollars on a micro SD card.

On the Pandora, you can't opkg install much except some (old) dev stuff and a couple of basic things. Anything else, like LibreOffice etc, has to be packaged as PND anyway because it's not available in the distro SZ is based on.

On the Pyra, I plan to install most of my software (except some games maybe) by apt-get installing it to the internal storage, so I can use the SD cards exclusively for media, roms etc. Being able to eject both SD cards while still having access to all software is nice, e.g. to duplicate an SD card.

So I would like to have at least 16GB of fastest-possible eMMC internal storage.

And I would suggest to make two models of the Pyra, a cheap base model and a more expensive premium model.

Features of the base model:

- 4GB (or maybe 8GB) fast eMMC, enough to install a decent base OS (after all that's still much larger than the Pandora NAND), but not much spare room

- no 3/4G

- wifi with 2.4GHz only

- cheaper than the premium model (e.g. 450 EUR)

Features of the premium model:

- 16GB (or maybe 32GB or even 64GB) fastest-possible eMMC

- 3/4G module

- wifi with 2.4GHz and 5GHz channels

- all other tech specs identical to the base model

- 250 EUR more expensive than the base model (e.g. 700 EUR)

This is just a completely made-up proposal, and just my personal opinion.

I would personally want to get the premium model, but I think it's good to have a more affordable option that still has all the essential features, in particular for people who intend to still use a phone or tablet as primary internet device. Or if you're mostly interested in retro-gaming/emulation, then there's no need for lots of internal storage and fancy internet options.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

As long as the Micro SD slot isn't broken in some way, I'd suggest that should be the route for anyone wanting to apt-get install any significant amount of stuff.  I installed the Pandora OS to an SD card, because I thought I might want to opkg install loads of stuff, but it turns out people PND up anything and everything I can think of, so I've not actually installed anything extra to it.

Perhaps users of alternative OSes might want more space if they want to reimage the device though, I suppose.  But for anyone using the community supplied Debian OS, if they want to hack loads of stuff on top, they might have to spend a few dollars on a micro SD card.

On the Pandora, you can't opkg install much except some (old) dev stuff and a couple of basic things. Anything else, like LibreOffice etc, has to be packaged as PND anyway because it's not available in the distro SZ is based on.

On the Pyra, I plan to install most of my software (except some games maybe) by apt-get installing it to the internal storage, so I can use the SD cards exclusively for media, roms etc. Being able to eject both SD cards while still having access to all software is nice, e.g. to duplicate an SD card.

So I would like to have at least 16GB of fastest-possible eMMC internal storage.

And I would suggest to make two models of the Pyra, a cheap base model and a more expensive premium model.

Features of the base model:

- 4GB (or maybe 8GB) fast eMMC, enough to install a decent base OS (after all that's still much larger than the Pandora NAND), but not much spare room

- no 3/4G

- wifi with 2.4GHz only

- cheaper than the premium model (e.g. 450 EUR)

Features of the premium model:

- 16GB (or maybe 32GB or even 64GB) fastest-possible eMMC

- 3/4G module

- wifi with 2.4GHz and 5GHz channels

- all other tech specs identical to the base model

- 250 EUR more expensive than the base model (e.g. 700 EUR)

This is just a completely made-up proposal, and just my personal opinion.

I would personally want to get the premium model, but I think it's good to have a more affordable option that still has all the essential features, in particular for people who intend to still use a phone or tablet as primary internet device. Or if you're mostly interested in retro-gaming/emulation, then there's no need for lots of internal storage and fancy internet options.

I just wonder if maybe the market is too small for two models of the Pyra. It also still depends on the final price of the current model proposed by evil dragon.

If it happened, two models, I'd be in for the premium model. 

 

[fusion_power]

And I would suggest to make two models of the Pyra, a cheap base model and a more expensive premium model.

Features of the base model:

- 4GB (or maybe 8GB) fast eMMC, enough to install a decent base OS (after all that's still much larger than the Pandora NAND), but not much spare room

- no 3/4G

- wifi with 2.4GHz only

- cheaper than the premium model (e.g. 450 EUR)

Features of the premium model:

- 16GB (or maybe 32GB or even 64GB) fastest-possible eMMC

- 3/4G module

- wifi with 2.4GHz and 5GHz channels

- all other tech specs identical to the base model

- 250 EUR more expensive than the base model (e.g. 700 EUR)

This is just a completely made-up proposal, and just my personal opinion.

I would personally want to get the premium model, but I think it's good to have a more affordable option that still has all the essential features, in particular for people who intend to still use a phone or tablet as primary internet device. Or if you're mostly interested in retro-gaming/emulation, then there's no need for lots of internal storage and fancy internet options.

+1Would make sense to get a wider audience that may be scared by the high price of the Pyra. And since the Pyra is compared modular, it should not be that much of an issue to start with two different priced versions. I would buy the "basic" version by the way.

I just wonder if maybe the market is too small for two models of the Pyra. It also still depends on the final price of the current model proposed by evil dragon.

If it happened, two models, I'd be in for the premium model.

ED already confirmed that he want to offer 2 versions of the Pyra, one with 3G/4G and one without.