Pandora Handheld

[Aradreth]

In an interview here Craig gives out the details on when the Pandora is out (pre-orders start 30th of September and going by what has been said before it should be out roughly 1 month after wards).

Anyone else going to be picking one of these up when they come out?

[Svartalf]

In an interview here Craig gives out the details on when the Pandora is out (pre-orders start 30th of September and going by what has been said before it should be out roughly 1 month after wards).

Anyone else going to be picking one of these up when they come out?

Heh... I plan on picking up one of the retail units once it comes out- but I already know something of what they're made of. I'm helping them work out the kinks with the initial firmware and have one of the first rev of MK0 unit boards in hand.

The claims are real.

Roughly 10 hours of run-time in normal clock speed mode.

At 600MHz, the unit is as fast as an ARM-11 handheld at 1.2GHz.

It can be clocked to something like 200MHz to 900MHz.

It has components that can be turned off via software. The DSP can drive things (Once configured...it may not be at rollout that way...) such that you can have a 100 hour run-time for playing MP3/Ogg/etc. off of one or both of the SD cards.

It has a GPU that is capable of easily doing ioquake type games- or other games of that same era or reduced capability modern games (as it has 8+ fully programmable shader processors...). We're waiting for a proper rev of the current OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 support that'll be GPL2/3 compatible while protecting Imagination Technologies' "intellectual property" to see that happen- should be shortly there. (That's when my real fun happens for this machine... )

[RobbieAB]

I'll probably get one when I have the money. It looks a cool piece of kit.

[Dragonlord]

I'll definitely keep an eye on this. Should be much more easier to hack for this guy than some NDS console

[xav1r]

This looks interesting, however i have 2 questions:

-Will this device have any kind of wireless support? Like the NDS or the PSP?

-Seeing that it has an ARM processor, like the NDS and the PSP, how powerful is it, speed wise, compared to either of the popular handheld consoles?

Thanks

[Aradreth]

This looks interesting, however i have 2 questions:

-Will this device have any kind of wireless support? Like the NDS or the PSP?

-Seeing that it has an ARM processor, like the NDS and the PSP, how powerful is it, speed wise, compared to either of the popular handheld consoles?

Thanks

It has WIFI and bluetooth speed wise it blows the NDS and PSP out the water. They have had it running at 900Mhz although the default clock speed is 600Mhz or less (changes the clock speed as required to save battery).

edit: To give you an idea how how fast it is the PSP CPU is only 333Mhz and the NDS has a 67Mhz ARM cpu...

[Svartalf]

This looks interesting, however i have 2 questions:

-Will this device have any kind of wireless support? Like the NDS or the PSP?

-Seeing that it has an ARM processor, like the NDS and the PSP, how powerful is it, speed wise, compared to either of the popular handheld consoles?

Thanks

Heh...

WiFi AND Bluetooth- built into the device itself. It's also got USB so you can probably expect WiMax if someone comes up with a Linux supported dongle for that as well.


CPU:

The NDS has an ARM-9 and ARM-7 core set running at 67 and 33 MHz respectively.

The PSP has a MIPS R4000 derivative, clockable from 1-333MHz.

One can't do a side-by-side comparison, obviously, because all systems are different.

However, if you do a clock to clock speed comparison on the DS' CPUs and the Pandora, you're looking at something like a 7 or 10 to one ratio without considering that it's a superscalar CPU with true floating point support and SIMD instructions- which will allow it to do more than the previous ARM core designs.

Some benchmarks for MIPS vs. ARM place the PSP at about 1/4th the power of the Cortex-A8. But, again, even if you accept this as valid, the PSP doesn't have a native DSP or GPU as part of it's SOC.

Unoptimized emus already ported over are at full framerate with no tuning, no optimizations. And we're not yet using the OpenGL ES or DSP support.

[Svartalf]

I'll definitely keep an eye on this. Should be much more easier to hack for this guy than some NDS console

Dramatically. It will have a real stack with OpenGL ES 2.0 much like the PS3 already offers.

Make your game for SDL and OpenGL for Linux/MacOS, make sure you don't exceed 128Mb of system footprint, make sure you don't do things that'd screw up an OpenGL ES version, and you've got the bulk of the work done.

[ivanovic]

An interview with EvilDragon at the IFA where he talks about the pandora: http://techvideoblog.com/ifa/open-pa...gon-interview/

EvilDragon is one of the guys behind the pandora, currently he is also hosting the file archive for the gp2x as well as the german gp2x shop and gp2x/wiz/pandora forum, too. It is likely that he will also do comparable stuff for the pandora (that is shop and file archive).

[Svartalf]

EvilDragon is one of the guys behind the pandora, currently he is also hosting the file archive for the gp2x as well as the german gp2x shop and gp2x/wiz/pandora forum, too. It is likely that he will also do comparable stuff for the pandora (that is shop and file archive).

He's working with a few other people right at the moment on UI stuff, from what I was able to garner from the forum threads. This is a consortium of homebrew, emu, embedded Linux, and game dev people combined with a few money people and hardware engineers trying to bring this thing to fruition. What you've seen on the videos isn't mockups, it's actual stuff running on the MK0 dev boards at this point. And it doesn't even show the best yet to come.