How powerful is the Open Pandora?


brokemike

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On a real world scale how powerful is my rebirth edition Open Pandora PC? I wanna hear from the pros.
 
its a clamp device, so it can easily bite your fingers much harder then the smart phones around these days. plus the sd slots have been compared to rocket launchers in the past, so the pandora is not to be messed with
 
A desktop can decode 1080p h264 video while the Pandora can only handle 480p. Using that as an approximate metric, the Pandora is about one quarter as powerful as a modern desktop with a single core.
 
What is a "real world scale" ?
Like, compared to the latest i7 processor to the new 8bit console from Skeezix. I guess that's a scale. 

A desktop can decode 1080p h264 video while the Pandora can only handle 480p. Using that as an approximate metric, the Pandora is about one quarter as powerful as a modern desktop with a single core.
Does not really mean anything, if you talk XP or Windows 7 or linux-based distro you get a very different feel for performance on the same processor...
 
Does not really mean anything, if you talk XP or Windows 7 or linux-based distro you get a very different feel for performance on the same processor...
The question itself doesn't really mean anything. The best you can do is take a task and compare how two things handle that single task.
 
This strong

review_motuc1_1.jpg
 
im much more tech savy than you think im looking for a much more definite answer but nvm ill just see on my own as its an interest for me comparing  it to tablets in such.
 
then you can understand there's no clear answer to what you ask... the best thing you can do is check the Software release boards and check what runs on the pandora...

and laugh at some nifty response in this thread :D
 
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A desktop can decode 1080p h264 video while the Pandora can only handle 480p. Using that as an approximate metric, the Pandora is about one quarter as powerful as a modern desktop with a single core.
I would estimate something a lot less generous, and I think your comparison is skewed by the fact that desktops could do 1080p in software for quite a while now.

Let's say on average around 1/3rd the perf/MHz/core of a Sandy Bridge. So if you have an i5-2500K like I do, which turbos up to 3.7GHz, the single threaded performance will be over 10x faster than even the 1GHz Pandoras.

Of course the actual numbers will vary a lot depending on the code. If your code is very cache friendly and the instructions are all scheduled nicely it can do better.

I kind of feel like not a lot of people want to give a very straight answer, so I'll make some random remarks that I think address the OP's question:

- The original 600MHz Pandora is about as powerful as a phone from mid-2009

- The newer 1GHz Pandora is about as powerful as a phone from mid-2010

- The original 600MHz Pandora can usually overclock to 900+MHz, but it's not quite as fast as the new one at 900MHz

- The newer 1GHz Pandora can usually overclock to 1.1-1.2GHz, making it still around the level of a 2010 phone

- Pandora has only one CPU core, which means that well-threaded software will show a bigger advantage on newer mobile hardware that has 2-4 cores. How much this matters varies a lot depending on the software - most emulators, for instance, are not that well threaded, but some are..

- The GPU on the original Pandora is really, really slow by today's standards. Mobile GPU power has increased a lot since then, a lot more than mobile CPU power has.

- The GPU on the newer Pandora is nearly twice as fast as the original's, but even then still very slow by today's standards.

- Software running on Pandora has some performance advantages vs software on Android and iOS thanks to some software advantages - like the ability to update to the screen very quickly, and some OS/driver tweaks. So it can often outperform similarly specced devices. It also helps that developers can optimize specifically for it. For example, even though I developed DraStic and gpu_neon with the intention of being useful on a lot of ARM platforms they're still relatively optimized for Cortex-A8 in particular so they'll run as well as possible on Pandora. Most Android and even iOS software isn't going to be optimized for any particular device or even CPU type.

- Compared to the other most developer/community friendly gaming handhelds out there, like Caanoo, Dingoo, or even GCW Zero Pandora is substantially more powerful. You can get a more powerful gaming handheld/tablet from China (that'll also be a lot cheaper) but the support and community, and reliability for that matter, are not really on the same level..

- CPU-wise, the single threaded power of the 1GHz version is roughly comparable to PSVita, while the multi-thread power is way behind. But at the same time it's far ahead of 3DS, single or multi-threaded.
 
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- Software running on Pandora has some performance advantages vs software on Android and iOS thanks to some software advantages - like the ability to update to the screen very quickly, and some OS/driver tweaks. So it can often outperform similarly specced devices. It also helps that developers can optimize specifically for it. For example, even though I developed DraStic and gpu_neon with the intention of being useful on a lot of ARM platforms they're still relatively optimized for Cortex-A8 in particular so they'll run as well as possible on Pandora. Most Android and even iOS software isn't going to be optimized for any particular device or even CPU type.
This is an important point, and it also holds to some extent for PC (Windows / Mac / generic x86 Linux distros) software, as long as you're running generic binaries and not binaries you manually compiled (or even asm-optimized) specifically for your hardware. E.g. for some tasks, notaz' hand-optimized SDL can be 2 or 3 times as fast as a generic stock SDL.

You always need software to make use of your hardware. Yes, recent phones have hardware specs that are vastly better than those of the Pandora. But in terms of software, nearly everything that is available for phones is designed to run on a wide range of devices, which means they have to make a trade-off between speed and portability. This means that you typically have several layers of abstraction between the application software and the actual hardware, which inevitably comes with an overhead. The abstraction is nice from a software development point of view, but lots of abstraction combined with a closed-source software distribution model means unavoidable overhead.

You'll also find few phone apps that really push your hardware to its limits and use all features it has. Instead, because it has to run on so many different devices, app developers (both Android and iOS) tend to aim for some kind of lowest common denominator - after all, they want to sell their app to an audience that is as large as possible.

This is different on the Pandora: you know exactly what the hardware is, so you can use all of it. E.g. the Pandora has two analogs and two shoulder buttons, so I designed a game (NubNub) that specifically uses those controls. I know what the native screen resolution is, so I don't have to make sure my graphics would work on everything between 320x240 and full HD. I know exactly the CPU type, so I can optimize the important spots to use fast NEON assembly code, instead of having to rely on generic ARM binaries or something abstract like Java bytecode.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Pandora software is hard to port by the way: as long as the software is Open Source and there are portable (e.g. C) alternatives for the asm bits, it will be no problem to recompile stuff for, say, a Pandora successor. It just means that when writing for, or porting to the Pandora, you can potentially do much better than when writing for or porting to generic platforms like PC, Android, or even iOS, because you have only 1 target (or 2, but they're identical except for clock speed) instead of a huge range of targets.
 
And as _wb_ said, in the end hardware is not that much relevant, software is the key differentiator. 

I'd take as an example the current PC graphic cards available, which should be capable of running extremely high and detailed graphics, but without games using them they are just expensive heaters pushing polygons that are too easy for them to push. 

The advantage of the Pandora is that it's open and still well supported. Anyone can come and make their own software and release it, and improve on what's already available. That's why we still see innovation on the platform. And it's powerful ENOUGH to do many things. It does not have to be extremely powerful to be a great machine. Look at the DS, it was very slow and clearly underpowered vs the PSP, but it still managed to attract many people because it had very good software. 

Software is the only thing that matters, and for the Pandora that's what makes it getting better every day. 
 
Just to give some numbers: I just did some quick benchmarks with NubNub on my ReBirth unit at 980MHz cpu, 360MHz system speed, and the frame limiter / dropper disabled.

With a stock SDL and SDL_gfx, even if they are compiled specifically for Cortex-A8 (but without using notaz' NEON tweaks and omapfb), I get about 40 FPS.

With notaz' SDL and a stock SDL_gfx, I get about 60 FPS.

With notaz' SDL and a tweaked SDL_gfx, I get about 100 FPS.

If this was a phone app, I wouldn't even get those 40 FPS (because I would have to use an even more generic build of SDL), so you would need hardware that is at least 2 or 3 times faster just to compensate.
 
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