Power Draw Due To Ram Extension.


the pandora is sounding totaly great,i really like the fact you can power down parts of the board and the display settings also sound superb,i think the battery life on this box will be tops and could get the device some real cred just for that.
 
Benjiro said:
Gilrad said:
Considering he made it seem as though there are two distinct sections of 128mb ram chips, I would assume it would be the latter.

I wonder if the 'power down unnecessary components' function can be streamlined to basically have the P operate on 128mb of ram by default until it runs out, then switch on the other 128 chip instead of swapping.
Seeing as how the nature of the ARM works, and other parts work, its going to be very "odd", if the system does not contain different banks / area blocks, that can power up or down when needed. Aka, 128MB = 8MB * 16blocks. You are using 17MB, so 3 blocks ( 24MB ) are powered up. Of course, its going to be a bitch to manage if a programmer tries to access a memory area outside of the available ( powered up ) blocks ( aka, the intelligent system for the memory might be forced to activate memory blocks when not needed to ). Unless they use the same system as SD's have to prevent wear & tear, but reverse ( forcing memory in the active blocks until they are full, and then power up the next block, and fill it ). Ofcourse, this is major speculation ;)

Having only 2 different 128MB blocks is going to be odd. Something i have been thinking about: It also question the manufacturing process. If they only had the room voor 128MB ram / 256MB flash in the initial OMAP's, why do they now have the room to add the extra 128MB ram / 256MB flash. Seeing as the OMAP's chip dimensions are not exactly alterable ( limited working space ). In other words, they now must have used a smaller manufacturing process for the memory/flash of these OMAP's. Might just be a wild gamble, but thats all we got to go on. To much gambling, guesswork :(


I don't think there was an issue with physical size, insomuch as an issue with price. The manufacturing process might be smaller, sure, but the larger issue with the Pandora not initially having the 256/512 version of the chip was a price issue.
 
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