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Tomaszd's Avatar
Posts: 284 | Thanked: 498 times | Joined on Jun 2009 @ Poland
#41
Aren't we over this yet? Some people are really out of touch, it's mainly the apps (and by that I also mean the UI itself) that make or break the platform, not the specs, which all of 5 people care about.

Trust me, the N900 has good enough specs for what is expected from it and things can still be optimized. Once we have those magical, affordable, economically viable batteries with much, much better energy density, then we can think about moving forward, OK?
 
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Posts: 304 | Thanked: 233 times | Joined on Jul 2009 @ São Paulo, SP, Brasil
#42
Originally Posted by Rocketman View Post
I am also concerned with premature flash wear due to swap usage. I had a very expensive Psion Netbook Pro become an expensive brick when I flashed the firmware and it encountered bad flash blocks.
Doesn't the swap go on the replaceable SD memory card you can change after it wears out?
 
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#43
Originally Posted by Crashdamage View Post
I'm with you! I'm cancelling my pre-order on this outdated piece of junk N900! I'll wait for something with at least a 2G Firedragon CPU, 4G RAM, 500G NAND and fuel cell battery!

If I live long enough...
Actually, that may be only a few years from now. Remember how specs were in 2000?
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#44
Originally Posted by nwerneck View Post
Doesn't the swap go on the replaceable SD memory card you can change after it wears out?
You could make a swap partition there, but by default there's one in the internal memory, so that it can work without card
I see no reason why a device cannot be flashed because of bad blocks in swap memory (which isn't special in itself, it's just normal storage space). If the swap partition gets bad, just make another one!
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SubCore's Avatar
Posts: 850 | Thanked: 626 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Vienna, Austria
#45
Originally Posted by nwerneck View Post
Doesn't the swap go on the replaceable SD memory card you can change after it wears out?
the default location of the swap partition is on the internal eMMC, which can't be replaced AFAIK.

but you could place it on the external SD card if you wish, though i doubt it would make much of a difference. there are optimizations in place to minimize flash wear out, so it shouldn't be an issue.
 
Posts: 1,255 | Thanked: 393 times | Joined on Oct 2009 @ US
#46
Originally Posted by bandora View Post
Now I have one thing to ask here.. I pre-ordered my N900 btw.. My question is that if I max out the 32 gb... will i still have the 768MB of virtual RAM?
Since the OS is going to use 2gb of the 32gb for app space, what space do we actually have of the 32gb?

32gb - format space - app space = 29-ish gb?
 
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Posts: 850 | Thanked: 626 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Vienna, Austria
#47
Originally Posted by Rushmore View Post
Since the OS is going to use 2gb of the 32gb for app space, what space do we actually have of the 32gb?
from the wiki page i linked to:

Current situation

* 256MB OneNAND chip: bootloader, kernel, root (ubifs - with compression)
* 32GB eMMC: /home ~2GB (ext3), /home/user/MyDocs ~29GB (vfat), swap 0.7GB
 
Posts: 1,255 | Thanked: 393 times | Joined on Oct 2009 @ US
#48
Originally Posted by Quindor View Post
Personally I am glad that nokia went with the OMAP3 instead of the Snapdragon with the N900. Snapdragon might give you the magical "1Ghz" figure, which in reality will drain your battery like I don't know what.

In reality, reading the whitepapers, snapdragon is not bad, just a very different SOC then OMAP3 is. OMAP3 gets it's strength from it's DSP's and GPU, where the Snapdragon gets it with raw cpu from clock speeds.

Using DSP's has been proven that it's less flexible, but way more power efficient. So if they can make good use of that design, it should be a win there.

Also... the N900 might just not need it. If you can do everything with it you want and in terms of mobile devices, is pretty much the fastest out there, or fast enough to do what anyone can think of doing with it? The choice is right again.

Also keep in mind that we don't actually know if anyone is using the GPU with licensed drivers from Qualcomm, in the past there have been major issues with this. Power consumption comes into play again, it might be faster, but at what cost?

About the memory issue. I'm thinking 256MB with 768MB swap should be sufficient, we will probably see a bump in this with Maemo6. If developers are aware, it should work pretty smoothly. And just like any other computer platform, if you run a rendering of for instance 3D Max, expect it to take all cpu and mem, if you are using notepad, expect it to only take a fraction of that. Use it wisely.....

It's like with the Nokia N97 and Samsung Omnia i8910. The Omnia i8910 has faster hardware and more memory all around, but the N97 somehow seems faster and the better experience. Purely efficient use of what is there, instead of throwing raw power at it, without optimizations.

Take a look at some info for Snapdragon and OMAP3. The OMAP3 has been "hand designed" for a port and is a quite balanced chip in the end. Where the SnapDragon has made consessions to achieve the 1Ghz, in a way that is less usefull, to me at least.

As a last note. I think that including only 256MB is also done because of power constraints. Using more high-speed RAM, uses more power. Simple as that.
This is basically what I said earlier, so I agree

Of course, the ironic thing is we do not have either device to compare anything, apples or oranges.

At the rate things are going though, people mght have HD2's before N900's
 
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#49
Originally Posted by Alex Atkin UK View Post
I have to admit I was a little surprised that the N900 did not have 512MB RAM which is the magic spot for Linux in my experience.
which experience based on which hardware and which software? We're not talking about a workstation running KDE/GNOME & Maya/Blender...

And top is ********.

Originally Posted by Rushmore View Post
Another point of concern is the AMD made GPU in snap is apparently power hungry too.
Which one is that?
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Posts: 1,255 | Thanked: 393 times | Joined on Oct 2009 @ US
#50
Originally Posted by allnameswereout View Post
which experience based on which hardware and which software? We're not talking about a workstation running KDE/GNOME & Maya/Blender...

And top is ********.

Which one is that?
Snapdragon, unless there are more than one source for their GPU-not counting the integrated features on snap itself.
 
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