Where Is The New Info On The Panda?

[whiskthecat]

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.

Well if unoptimized code is running 3x faster on what Squidge calls a "conservative" clock speed, I think the clock will probably be adjusted down for optimal battery life since performance is so good. This would apply to almost all systems being emulated older than the ps1.

 

[A_SN]

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.

Well if unoptimized code is running 3x faster on what Squidge calls a "conservative" clock speed, I think the clock will probably be adjusted down for optimal battery life since performance is so good. This would apply to almost all systems being emulated older than the ps1.

Well it's not just unoptimised, it's jut not using the full instruction set, like running a 486 binary on a modern CPU with MMX, SSE1/2/3 etc..

As for the battery life, as Exophase (iirc) keeps saying, if this thing has proper V-Sync wait, then we won't need to downclock to save battery life, as hardly any power will be drained while the main running program would wait for the V-Sync. That means full speed all the time and optimised battery efficiency. Now it all depends on how V-Sync is actually implemented.

 

[Squidge]

For some applications, it may be easier to down clock the unit, rather than rewrite the programs so they use the hardware properly. It all depends on how they are written.

But for new applications, there should be no need to down clock.

(I won't say "under clock" as there's not really an official "It should run at xMhz")

 

[A_SN]

But for new applications, there should be no need to down clock.

Yay! So that means proper V-Sync, doesn't it?

By the way, what did you mean by conservative clock? Exophase thinks it means 600 MHz instead of 550 MHz, I rather thought about 800..

 

[icurafu]

ARM may think the minimum is 650MHz, but TI has stated 450MHz as the minimum likely to be used for phones.

We don't have any indication on how they will overclock.

The units that use close to zero power when in standby are not supposed to clock super high. The 1GHz and above units are all processed using the GP process which goes even above 1.1GHz on standard.

http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM_Cortex-A8.html - It's all at the bottom. At 650Mhz we can expect 0.38W.

 

[OMars]

Stop everything! This is going to be more than one inch thick?
QUOTE
- 128MB DDR-333 SDRAM

- 256MB NAND FLASH memory

- Texas Instruments OMAP3430 processor at 550MHz

- Dimensions: 140x83x27mm

WTF is that? I would rather get a umpc if it ends up being that thick. :rolleyes:

 

[icurafu]

It's a laptop form-factor. What do you expect?

I demensions are quite good I think.

 

[Shiny]

Stop everything! This is going to be more than one inch thick?
WTF is that? I would rather get a umpc if it ends up being that thick. :rolleyes:

That's 1.9mm thinner than the original DS.
Keep in mind that this is a clamshell.

 

[whiskthecat]

Gp2x is pretty close in thickness if you include the battery box.

 

[Yrx]

And thicker is better for a good grip.

 

[prairiefire]

one inch thick? fuck yeah.

 

[fusion_power]

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).

With all this interesting and "free" MHz Skills of the Chipset, maybe it would be good to know, how fast the Pandora clocks. Because nobody liked my Idea of an seperate MHz Display, the current Clockspeed could be displayed optional in the applications or with an always working key-combination over all applications?
I always like to know the current speed of my computers.

 

[magicman5421]

you mean like the clock speed and other vitals would show up and what you were doing would kinda fade a little when you pressed a few buttons? it's doable...but i don't know how many people would actually need/use it.