When Pyra would be cheaper? When There would be new replacement boards?

[sulu]

This thread looks more and more like a bazar scene from a 1001 nights movie - very entertaining though!

The OMAP5 can use up to 8GB, but honestly I think for the most part the 4GB the Pyra will get is overkill, I have been using the OMAP5 devboard for a couple years now and never found any practical application that will drive my Devboard to use all of the 2GB ram it has. 4GB does market better I suppose.

If you take into account, that the Pyra will fulfill ordinary desktop tasks for some users then 4GB is not overkill, especially if you consider that the SoC board will have to do that without upgrades for some years. If you belong to the people having lots of tabs open in your browser then filling a GB or two of RAM with it alone is no problem. Then you might also have some documents open in Libreoffice and a GUI e-mail program lurking in the background and you'll find yourself eating up your RAM in chunks of hundreds of MB in no time. I'm not saying it wouldn't work well with 2GB, but 4GB gives you the luxury of not having to think about RAM consumption (at least for now).

My Iphone 6s was about the same as the Pyra, expect it has 64 gb...
So an Iphone isnt that expensive, unless you wants the newest modell, ...

You paid with your freedom (and the freedom of your family, friends and acquaintances) when you agreed to enter the golden cage and give Apple access to your personal data (and the data of all the people that trusted you to handle theirs with care).

@Yuji:
I suggest you see the Pyra for what it is: Unless you are in a very special situation with very unique requirements, then the Pyra will just be a toy for you.
And I suggest that you see money for what it is: The amount you need to run your life (including all obligations) is essential and should not be consumed by non-essential expenses. Any amount beyond that is basically worthless.
So the question of whether the Pyra is worth its money boils down to whether this toy fits in your "worthless excess budget". And if it conflicts with other toys within that budget, then you need to prioritize which toy is more important to you.

 

[TrashyMG]

If you take into account, that the Pyra will fulfill ordinary desktop tasks for some users then 4GB is not overkill, especially if you consider that the SoC board will have to do that without upgrades for some years. If you belong to the people having lots of tabs open in your browser then filling a GB or two of RAM with it alone is no problem. Then you might also have some documents open in Libreoffice and a GUI e-mail program lurking in the background and you'll find yourself eating up your RAM in chunks of hundreds of MB in no time. I'm not saying it wouldn't work well with 2GB, but 4GB gives you the luxury of not having to think about RAM consumption (at least for now).

Look, I've been using the OMAP5 for over 2 years now, I can tell you have to do an unusual amount of web browsing to even push the memory over 1GB let alone use 2GB. If you have have enough tabs open to utilize close to 2GBs, you have already loaded the CPU down to the point of being sluggish mess. This isn't Windows, or some heavier Linux installs, it's not like you burn 2GBs just being idle, an XFCE4 desktop idle uses around 60-80MBs, the current MATE desktop is just a little over 100MB idle.

Here is an old video of me trying to utilize all 2GBs of memory on the devboard.

 

[erico]

I would not say or think that German is "rich", but the "poor" country point of view is also my case (and another from another user here other then the OP).

The conversion from Real to Dollar seems stable at 3.2 (it was 2 last year). To get an idea of value of money, I live in single bedroom apartment (pretty nice one) in Florianopolis, which is a capital of a south state. I live by 2 universities, very expensive place to live and I pay 300 dollars rent. I eat outside at about 3 dollars a meal (that is a very great natural meal, let you know, no mc donalds). So living and food seems very cheap and of nice quality but you are going to have a hard time finding people making more then 1k dollars a month, VERY HARD. Now the Pyra price, let´s say 800 dollars + 200 dollars shipping to brasil (lottery here), this automatically becomes 1600 dollars as 600 is taxes, but since the value is above 500 dollars, there is a no-one-knows system of taxes that can easily add 50% of the sum on top. So 2400 dollars if you are lucky, IF YOU ARE LUCKY let me repeat that. That is just about an impossible price for standard brazilians to pay, only for sultains and maybe for a person that works daily with it and it is an essential tool. See, if you think a Pyra is expensive, imagine having to pay 3x the Pyra price living in a country where an 8 hour daily work(if you have any) gets you 2/3 of what you need as basic per month (if you don´t have kids)...and it is going to take some long months before you order is legally processed, 3 to 6 months, should anything happen with the Pyra while that is going on is also not their problem.

Enough of crying, that is life, but I think the only way I would ever be able to buy a pyra is if I have a friend going aboard and can bring in for me (this usually avoids all problems and taxes but the pyra may be labelled as 499$ for that to work).
Seriously, If I could afford to buy a 3x price Pyra, I´d definently fly my ass to Germany. buy one for me and 2 for donation to those who didn´t get a pandora yet.
I´d never give brazilian government those 2 pyras.

The OP dilema is something we constantly have to deal around here when it comes to electronics. It is a very legit question.

 

[ClockworkCoder]

@ClockworCoder do suppose think there would be better CPU board in 6months? it not neccessary have to be done from scratch. If it would get 64bit or PAE and have at least 8GB of RAM (or preferably 16GB version) I would buy it almost without considering "yes or not" even if price would go a bit higher (since it would have 4x memory, new tech CPU and probably faster).

I doubt it. However, I'm hopeful that there will be an upgrade, well before it ends it's natural lifespan, in a couple of years at most. Just don't assume that an upgrade path will necessarily become available at all, and then ask yourself if you still want it.

No one can predict what will happen in the future, after all.

 

[Letalis Sonus]

If you take into account, that the Pyra will fulfill ordinary desktop tasks for some users then 4GB is not overkill

You underestimate how efficient the system works with its RAM, the Pandora already did very well with only 256 MiB RAM, a single GiB would already be enough to not care about RAM usage at all. Filling up 2 GiB on the OMAP5 with "desktop usage" is a difficult task, the only thing I can think of to make use of such large amounts of RAM is using the A15s' virtualization capabilities for some VMs.

 

[sulu]

Look, I've been using the OMAP5 for over 2 years now, I can tell you have to do an unusual amount of web browsing to even push the memory over 1GB let alone use 2GB. If you have have enough tabs open to utilize close to 2GBs, you have already loaded the CPU down to the point of being sluggish mess. This isn't Windows, or some heavier Linux installs, it's not like you burn 2GBs just being idle, an XFCE4 desktop idle uses around 60-80MBs, the current MATE desktop is just a little over 100MB idle.

I have several systems (x86 and arm) ranging from 128MB to far beyond 4GB of RAM. All off these systems are running some sort of Debian, some with a leaner, some with a more bloated desktop. I've managed to fill the RAM of all the <4GB systems with just browser tabs and basic office programs.
You can even do this without putting any significant stress on the CPU. Idle website with no dynamic content will consume RAM, but no CPU time.

This post has been written in Firefox/amd64 with 29 tabs open (totally normal amount for me). The browser alone currently consumes 1GB of RAM (top RES column). Besides that there is an instance of Thunderbird (300MB), one simple text document in Libreoffice (220MB) and Xorg (320MB).
Then there's another 600MB consumed by various KDE stuff, but I don't want to count that because I wouldn't use KDE on the Pyra.
The overall CPU usage barely scratches 2% (Haswell i5), so even the OMAP5 should be able to manage that. I know the Atom N270 in my netbook would.

Due to Linux' excessive use of cache, there is basically no such thing like "too much RAM". But it will become sluggish pretty quickly once you have no RAM left for caching.

You underestimate how efficient the system works with its RAM, the Pandora already did very well with only 256 MiB RAM,

I can assure you I do not underestimate the efficiency of Linux' RAM handling. I have a Nokia N900, which has 256MB of RAM too and is generally pretty close to the Pandora performance-wise. On the N900 the low amount of RAM has been the bottleneck from day one (2009). The community even went so far to recompile the whole repository to save some RAM on the cost of CPU usage.
I also have a Cubieboard2 with 1GB RAM. During normal desktop tasks the RAM is the bottleneck.
And I have an old laptop from 2007 that is my HTPC. It has 3GB of RAM, which in most cases still is the bottleneck on this system.

a single GiB would already be enough to not care about RAM usage at all.

Forgive my bluntness, but this statement shows that you either have no idea what you're talking about or that you have a very limited idea of what dektop usage can be.
Yes, a Linux desktop can run fine within 1GB of RAM. But it is also no problem to fill more than 2GB with just desktop tasks. It all depends on how you use it. And I think neither of us is in a position to tell someone else that his usage is plain "wrong".

 

[TrashyMG]

This post has been written in Firefox/amd64 with 29 tabs open (totally normal amount for me). The browser alone currently consumes 1GB of RAM (top RES column). Besides that there is an instance of Thunderbird (300MB), one simple text document in Libreoffice (220MB) and Xorg (320MB).

Did you watch the video I made? I did all that and more and still can't make it consume as much RAM as you are suggesting here.

 

[ible]

maybe we can take the RAM arguments to another thread? i recall there being a few...

 

[WizardStan]

I have been using the OMAP5 devboard for a couple years now and never found any practical application that will drive my Devboard to use all of the 2GB ram it has

I've suggested the need to open up a couple hundred tabs simultaneously. Have you tested that use case yet?

 

[TrashyMG]

I've suggested the need to open up a couple hundred tabs simultaneously. Have you tested that use case yet?

PM a list of 100 websites to load.

Edit: second thought that may be a bad idea.

 

[Haraldur]

PM a list of 100 websites to load.

On Reddit: go to a couple of subreddits you fancy (perhaps r/linux and r/programming) and open at least 10 tabs from each -- the ones that look more interesting; perhaps also open the original articles cited (if any).

On this forum: go to "New Posts" and open up any interesting-looking threads (perhaps 5-10).

Go to a news website or two (I use BBC News or the Guardian) and open, in new tabs, a bunch of interesting-looking articles. Some sites, like the Guardian, can be quite heavy. That could get you 20-30 tabs.

On YouTube: to simulate several hours of computer use, open a few dozen music videos, each in its own tab, for the user to replay at will. I suggest Guillaume de Machaut, Monteverdi and Fares Karam (فارس كرم) -- some of his videos are hilarious, in a "Donald Trump would love this" way.

On Google: search for some relatively obscure topic (yesterday I searched for "singer's formant") and open up most (interesting-looking) links on the first results page, plus a few images and pages from the image search.

On Wikipedia: go to the ongoing conflicts page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts) and open up tabs for some of the more interesting or surprising wars (this applies to any Wikipedia list or article). In a real session, reading some of the war articles will lead to the opening of more links (in new tabs).

This would be quite typical activity for me on a quiet Saturday. Since my computer is rarely restarted, and some stuff (especially music) is kept open for future reference, tabs tend to accumulate to over 1000 by the end of the week. Occasionally, Chromium crashes.

I doubt that I would use the Pyra in this way. Aside from the reduced RAM, the smaller screen would make managing such a large number of tabs (and windows) much more difficult, so the numbers reached through natural behaviour would be much reduced. Still, use of Youtube could take one or two GiBs in Chromium, even on the Pyra (although, saying that, I strongly suspect that Chromium varies its RAM use based on how much the system has, and I normally use a machine with 32 GiBs of RAM).

 

[TrashyMG]

Okay video, It's pretty long and boring, but it proves my point for the most part.


Just to note 27 minutes later it was mostly finished up loading all of the pages and it wasn't utilizing all of the memory yet ~1.65GBs, but the CPU was still bogged down.

 

[TheOldOne]

(although, saying that, I strongly suspect that Chromium varies its RAM use based on how much the system has, and I normally use a machine with 32 GiBs of RAM).

It does

 

[Neelix]

Not sure that was really a fair test, in that it doesn't really represent real use.

Firstly, I'm pretty sure that when you start firefox and it reloads a previous session, it doesn't actually load the content of each tab until you actually go to view it, (unless the tabs are "pinned") so most of the tabs you already had open at the beginning probably wouldn't have been contributing greatly to your memory use.

Secondly, in an actual browsing session you wouldn't normally be loading so many pages at a time. Normally each page would be fully loaded, and the scripts on that page started and consuming memory before you started loading another. What would have been more interesting to see would have been the memory usage once all those tabs had been fully loaded and had been open for half an hour or so with intermittent navigation to other pages in a few of them. (Not that I'd want to see a video of all that, but I believe that that would be a better way to check the typical memory usage) (Edit: And each page loaded viewed at least once. Seems common these days to load content dynamically via scripts as the user scrolls down.)

Also the google image search is a good one to try. Use a generic search term that generates a lot of hits, then scroll down the results for a while, selecting one to view from time to time, see what that does to your memory usage.

If you have a Duolingo account I'd suggest browsing some of the forums there too, especially in the longer threads.

-Neelix

 

[TrashyMG]

Not sure that was really a fair test, in that it doesn't really represent real use.

Well I can't seem to make anyone happy....
yeah I restored ~20 of the 100ish pages I opened in succession because I needed to reboot between setting up my recording setup as my HDMI recorder forced an odd resolution.
Of course my video isn't normal use case, but just opening 10 to 20 tabs quickly which can be borderline normal use case can bog the CPU down for a bit.

 

[Neelix]

*shrugs* To be honest I'm not fussed about the amount of memory in the Pyra. When I have enough money to order one I'll go for a 4gb model and I'm sure that will do me just fine. What I have noticed on my own system though is that firefox's memory requirements seem to balloon after I've been using it a while, and that your tests don't seem to take that into account.

-Neelix

 

[WizardStan]

Secondly, in an actual browsing session you wouldn't normally be loading so many pages at a time

Speak for yourself. My morning routine is "right click open all" my webcomics folders. Broken into three lists because otherwise it gets unwieldy. 100 tabs all at once, it takes about 3 minutes and consumes 12GB of RAM (8GB real, 4GB swap) in both Chromium and Firefox.

Just to note 27 minutes later it was mostly finished up loading all of the pages and it wasn't utilizing all of the memory yet ~1.65GBs, but the CPU was still bogged down.

Jeegus. I'm satisfied with these stats. How on earth it can open 100ish tabs without running into swap where my desktop's 8GB are gobbled up long before everything finishes loading is a mystery, though.

 

[jeeks]

@WizardStan holy wow, i don't even know that many webcomics! have you ever tried putting them in an rss reader thing?

 

[Letalis Sonus]

I'm satisfied with these stats. How on earth it can open 100ish tabs without running into swap where my desktop's 8GB are gobbled up long before everything finishes loading is a mystery, though.

Probably simply because it does things differently on ARM - avoiding memory intensive speed optimizations, using a more memory efficient allocation algorithm and so on. Firefox does have some ARM specific things in its code, e.g. I know that the hardcoded sample format of its audio framework changes from float to integer when compiling for ARM.

 

[ible]

i think this just goes to show, if your browsing habits include loading 100s of webpages at once, you either need to use a desktop computer, or you need to code your very own browser built for efficiently doing that sort of thing. (or start using bookmarks instead .)

also, @TrashyMG, videos are much appreciated, not sure why people are being too picky... though, as a life hack, you do know about control click to open a link in a new tab?