A week ago the PandaBoard/ was announced and I WANT ONE. (but no money..)
But one thing has been bugging the hell out of me every since I read the page, that is the following info:
Low power audio (upto 140+ hr CD-quality audio playback)
Owh cool 140+ Hourse of CD-quality audio playback.. eeuh wait
- What power supply? 2 AA batteries? 120AH lead battery? Diesel generator with a 100 gallon tank?
- What format? what software? running on the CPU? running on 2 CPU’s? running on the DSP?
It is very nice information but sais _absolutely_ nothing, it tells me not a single thing, beside the fact the device is capable of audio playback.
Also the following:
Full HD (1080p) multi-standard video encode/decode
I am convince my old beagleboard can do that too, and the small arm11 box too. No not real-time, but they do not mention that either.
Dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ with Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) at 1Ghz each. Allows for 150% performance increase over previous ARM Cortex-A8 cores.
A9 core is nice offcourse, at 1Ghz, fancy.. and 150% faster then an A8. so a dual core is only 50% faster then a single A8? or each core? The A8 is it running at 500mhz? 720 mhz (as the previous beagleboard can do), 1Ghz (as the beagleboard xm I think).
And I can go on like this. I am still very exited about it, and I want one. But how hard is it to give some highlights that actually tell me something.
3 Comments
You seem to confuse the OMAP4430 processor highlights as PandaBoard platform highlights — Ref: http://pandaboard.org/content/platform
You got to remember that In general – It’s usually very challenging to give meaningful & completed details like power & performance for a development platform like PandaBoard which has software in under very active development … without getting very verbose and meanigless
I did not confuse anything, I was just saying that it is pointless and meaningless to mention it in that way.
I only looked at the pandaboard page.
I know I was ranting a bit, that is why it was tagged Grind my gears.
edit: It seems the page is updated, I copy/pasted the above information from that platform page. .
edit2: It seems it is somewhat likely you did the edit
edit3: I keep on going. The target audience (right spelling) for the pandaboard is likely to have enough knowledge that it does not need a pointless (up to 140+ hours of cd quality music) remark.
Just ran across your post while looking for any PandaBoard alternatives that may or may not exist yet.
Your points about how PandaBoard’s site lacking any real description is valid. However, just to clarify something you may have misread…
They are claiming a 150% performance increase, not 150% of the old performance. For example, if my car could go 100mph, and then I bolted on a turbo that increased it’s top speed by 150%, it can now go 250mph.
Though I’m no expert on OMAPs, I would assume they are comparing the CPU frequencies of the old 800MHz single cores with the new 1GHz dual core (2GHz total).
2000MHz/800Mhz = 2.5
2.5 is 150% more than 1.
However, like you point out, I hardly expect such a dramatic increase in performance. You certainly don’t see benchmarks like that on equally comparable Intel processors.