Where Is The New Info On The Panda?

[StealthBagel]

I was wondering the exact same thing as Mister B here..... the homepage doesn't strike me as professional at all, and there is no info beyond the deadline promised... when someone points this out the message is changed to act like the deadline never existed, self imposed or not.... then I come on here to find one of the members of the 'Pandora Team' is engaging in bickering and namecalling against random people just because they don't want to buy his product. I'm hoping the best for this product as it has a lot of potential but the handling of this whole endeavor from a marketing standpoint is disconcerting at best. The behavior on this forum is exceedingly immature and childish to say the least and to see a team who are trying to put out a serious product for sale engage in it doesn't paint a bright future for this device. M. Weston's comments have been professional and unbiased at least and it seems like he's the individual in charge of the machine's physical design, the most important aspect, so I hope it's only the merchants like craigix who are going to resort to such ridiculous behavior.... if it means less sales for them well, then they'll know what is acceptable and what is not, I'll find a seller who knows to separate personal issues from business. But maybe I am being overly idealistic, a handheld gaming device designed from input on an internet forum (one of the most immature entities you can find online), with barely any professional front, is going to be plagued by senseless drama from day one to the grave.

 

[quote]

I was wondering the exact same thing as Mister B here..... the homepage doesn't strike me as professional at all, and there is no info beyond the deadline promised... when someone points this out the message is changed to act like the deadline never existed, self imposed or not.... then I come on here to find one of the members of the 'Pandora Team' is engaging in bickering and namecalling against random people just because they don't want to buy his product. I'm hoping the best for this product as it has a lot of potential but the handling of this whole endeavor from a marketing standpoint is disconcerting at best. The behavior on this forum is exceedingly immature and childish to say the least and to see a team who are trying to put out a serious product for sale engage in it doesn't paint a bright future for this device. M. Weston's comments have been professional and unbiased at least and it seems like he's the individual in charge of the machine's physical design, the most important aspect, so I hope it's only the merchants like craigix who are going to resort to such ridiculous behavior.... if it means less sales for them well, then they'll know what is acceptable and what is not, I'll find a seller who knows to separate personal issues from business. But maybe I am being overly idealistic, a handheld gaming device designed from input on an internet forum (one of the most immature entities you can find online), with barely any professional front, is going to be plagued by senseless drama from day one to the grave.

Namecalling? Immature? 'A bad website design'? GTFO, and just before you do, show me some of this namecalling and imature behaviour please. Ugh... <_<

 

[StealthBagel]

Reading the thread would be a great start uh, 'pandora'.

I don't know, maybe you missed the part where one of the biggest proprietors of this project called some random guy out because he didn't want to buy the pandora and told him he was trolling for it... Or that he apparently the former forum antichrist or something equivalent. I haven't actually seen any useful information from that guy (craigix) in ages actually.... just conjecture and comments about software he hopes to run on it and also something about stealing OS software from the EEE PC. not confidence inspiring is all I'm saying.

Oh and the bit about 'bad design' is that it's very tacky and looks thrown together.. even to the point of, instead of using even the most rudimentary tables or frames or CSS it's got things spaced out by using a blank image file of the appropriate width..... that's just awful. But it's beside the point, I already said what I needed to.

 

[Yuglooc]

Nevermind

 

[whiskthecat]

I don't know, maybe you missed the part where one of the biggest proprietors of this project called some random guy out because he didn't want to buy the Pandora and told him he was trolling for it...

Hmmm, he doesn't want to buy a Pandora. Why the hell is he even posting in the Pandora forums then? Sounds like trolling to me. For example, I have absolutely no plans to buy an obese goat, therefore I don't go randomly posting my suggestions in forums that are all about obese goats. Make sense?

As for the website being crappy, I think it would be pretty stupid to spend a bunch of time/money on a fancy looking website when the "team" isn't even ready to release any new information. I am sure the site will become much more functional when it actually has a reason to function.

 

[atomicthumbs]

BACK ON TOPIC

the info is hiding...

 

[Chip]

BACK ON TOPIC

the info is hiding...

You should consider the possibility that the reason there is no new info on the site is because there isn't any new info.

I worked in the laptop manufacturing business for a couple years, and getting info out of the factories in Taiwan was like pulling teeth. Finding out if and when hardware problems would be resolved was always difficult, and requesting new features was pointless because they made whatever they wanted to anyway.

Granted, these were some of the larger laptop OEMs, and we were very small compared to some of their other customers (Dell, for example). Still, it is well within reason to think that there simply isn't any new, 100% solid info to release right now. And judging by the reactions to the info released so far, they would want it to be 100% solid before saying anything. Can you imagine a post stating "Good news, it will probably have X Feature!" Then a month later, after the engineers work things out, it turns out feature X isn't doable. Heads would explode from rage over being "lied to".

Please consider the whole situation before you start demanding things.

All of this isn't really directed at thumbs, but there are definitely some people here with an undeserved sense of entitlement. I'm sure the development team isn't hiding info out of spite. How about we just settle down, stop going out of our way to pick fights, and wait like rational people.

 

[icurafu]

openpandora.ca has some info at the bottom of the page that was not there before. I know it's been mentioned elsewhere, but atleast it is new news. 550MHz CPU, 128DDR 333MHz and 256MB NAND.

I'm sure FAQs, and blogs will come along soon. It'll be really good in no time, once we all et to see what can be done with the dev boards. That'll be entertaining enough for me until April.

 

[dontspam]

atomicthumbs ment exactly what he said.

:lol:

 

[Squidge]

openpandora.ca has some info at the bottom of the page that was not there before. I know it's been mentioned elsewhere, but atleast it is new news. 550MHz CPU, 128DDR 333MHz and 256MB NAND.

Pity it's wrong really

 

[kanzlr]

according to the ARM official cortex site, the slowest A8 available runs at 650MHz, and ED once said it will default to 800MHz, well

 

[atomicthumbs]

openpandora.ca has some info at the bottom of the page that was not there before. I know it's been mentioned elsewhere, but atleast it is new news. 550MHz CPU, 128DDR 333MHz and 256MB NAND.

I'm sure FAQs, and blogs will come along soon. It'll be really good in no time, once we all et to see what can be done with the dev boards. That'll be entertaining enough for me until April.

As I said, it's hiding.

 

[StealthBagel]

according to the ARM official cortex site, the slowest A8 available runs at 650MHz, and ED once said it will default to 800MHz, well

Didn't he also say the GPU would be 1600 MHz, which is complete off the wall nonsense.... even the most advanced PC-based video cards don't have RAM clocked that high. And we're talking about a graphics block roughly on par with a GeForce 3 not an 8800GTX.

Every impression I got from M. Weston (who really seems to be the brains behind this entire project, rather than marketing/financially involved) was that the OMAP3 chipsets have NO set clock and only a range within they CAN operate, the selected frequency is dependent on the whims of the device manufacturer and what application they are aiming for; e.g. a cell phone using the chipset would be clocked lower and a gaming device would be clocked higher. It should be simple to adjust the internal PLLs by manipulating registers in software though. That's a standard feature on modern SOC chipsets... even fly by night chipsets like gp2x's mmsp2 could do that.

I strongly suspect each omap3 will have a different top speed, and it will also vary based on core voltage selected. Hopefully that is a software adjustment as well made available to users... with a warning, I'm sure, that if they exceed the operational spec of the omap3 their warranty wouldn't cover it. Though with conservative adjustment for short periods of time that sort of tweaking is usually pretty harmless in my experience.

 

[Aquilus]

Official information about the ARM Cortex-A8 can be read here.

 

[Squidge]

To give you a rough estimation of the new chip, I've compiled an emulator for the gp2x, noted down some performance figures from various roms, and then run the exact same executable on the new platform (No recompiling or whatever, so no platform-specific optimisations).

The new platform was typically 3x faster. I'll let you guess how fast it will be when it is compiled for the Cortex (ARMv7) rather than 920 (ARMv4t), and then you have other hardware acceleration (and lets not forget this is all running on an unoptimised Linux kernel, drivers/etc, with early hardware).

Oh, and the clock speed is a little on the conservative side at the moment, too

Like they say, the only way is up

 

[atomicthumbs]

on the new platform

!!!

 

[MWeston]

Didn't he also say the GPU would be 1600 MHz, which is complete off the wall nonsense.... even the most advanced PC-based video cards don't have RAM clocked that high. And we're talking about a graphics block roughly on par with a GeForce 3 not an 8800GTX.

Every impression I got from M. Weston (who really seems to be the brains behind this entire project, rather than marketing/financially involved) was that the OMAP3 chipsets have NO set clock and only a range within they CAN operate, the selected frequency is dependent on the whims of the device manufacturer and what application they are aiming for; e.g. a cell phone using the chipset would be clocked lower and a gaming device would be clocked higher. It should be simple to adjust the internal PLLs by manipulating registers in software though. That's a standard feature on modern SOC chipsets... even fly by night chipsets like gp2x's mmsp2 could do that.

I strongly suspect each omap3 will have a different top speed, and it will also vary based on core voltage selected. Hopefully that is a software adjustment as well made available to users... with a warning, I'm sure, that if they exceed the operational spec of the omap3 their warranty wouldn't cover it. Though with conservative adjustment for short periods of time that sort of tweaking is usually pretty harmless in my experience.

Yeah, not sure where ED got those numbers from, but I did try to clear that up in a different thread a while back. The graphics core in all SOC's is a fractional value of the main processor clock. It would be impossible to keep the pipe full if the clock was anywhere near the processor clock and would completely dominate the memory bus. The result would be degraded performance at an ever higher power consumption! The graphics core does have a set clock speed that will be made available when Pandora is released.

The ARM core clock speed doesn't seem to have a pre-defined speed. TI seems to expect their customers to clock the chip at a speed that suits their needs for battery life but then we aren't using a tiny little battery like you would have in a cell phone (which is where these chips usually go) so we should have more freedom to speed it up as we see fit. Development kits are set at 440MHz and 550MHz and of course they have that news report at 1GHz. It will probably be a very dynamic setup for Pandora: low clock for things like the main menu, MP3 playback, and some video playback and then boost the clock for apps that need it (like emulators and web browsers).

 

[Peter R]

Does the GPU have any dedicated RAM?

 

[Chip]

The ARM core clock speed doesn't seem to have a pre-defined speed. TI seems to expect their customers to clock the chip at a speed that suits their needs for battery life but then we aren't using a tiny little battery like you would have in a cell phone (which is where these chips usually go) so we should have more freedom to speed it up as we see fit. Development kits are set at 440MHz and 550MHz and of course they have that news report at 1GHz. It will probably be a very dynamic setup for Pandora: low clock for things like the main menu, MP3 playback, and some video playback and then boost the clock for apps that need it (like emulators and web browsers).

So TI doesn't give you an upper limit. Interesting. Have you done any torture testing to determine a safe upper limit, or will it be more like the GP2X where it is a matter of luck what your particular unit can handle? I'm concerned about applications being released with a very high clock speed because it works fine on the developers unit, only to have it cause other units to destabilize.

I know extensive testing of every single unit you sell is probably not an option, but a "generally acceptable" max freq. guideline would help to at least discourage potentially harmful overclocking. I'm not suggesting higher frequencies be somehow locked out, instead an official policy of "All units should operate correctly up to XXXMHz". Anything beyond that would be at-your-own-risk.

 

[Peter R]

I think that it will be up to the user to choose the clockspeed for most applications.