5 ms·

What's the selling point of 64MB of RAM with a 1GHz CPU?

BeefWellington 3y ago
People got a lot done in the Pentium II / III era of computing. Dell shipped 32 and 64MB of RAM as the basic standard on their lines that also offered 1Ghz CPUs at the time[1]. I think it's easy to be unaware of how vastly speed outpaced memory density at some points. It's kind of what we saw a few years ago with core counts and limitations on DDR3 and early DDR4. [1]: https://dl.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_desktop/esuprt_optiplex_desktop/optiplex-gx1_setup%20guide_en-us.pdf https://dl.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_desktop/esup...
lelanthran 3y ago
> What's the selling point of 64MB of RAM with a 1GHz CPU? Well, the first server I ran had 64MB of RAM and, IIRC, a 0.6GHz CPU. Ran slackware with apache and my software was written in C as CGI scripts (generated charts on page visits using, IIRC, libgd). You can do a lot. You won't do it in JS or Python or Ruby or C# or Java, and you won't produce AAA games or ML or cryptocurrency or similar, but you can write you useful software that runs snappily on a 64MB/1GHz machine. TBH, I can't think of much that a 64MB/1GHz machine cannot do.
- ravetcofx 3y ago
  Found the integrated systems developer
human_banana 3y ago
The ESP32 microcontroller has 320Kb of RAM, and a dual core 240MHz CPU. It's is one of the most useful microcontrollers out there. 64MB and 1GHz CPU is a lot more and a lot faster, so IOT and edge-computing are able to process data locally.
- picture 3y ago
  The moment you run linux on it, it gets a bit scarce. These MMU enabled chips are pretty complicated and its really difficult to run them bare metal like ESP32. MCUs and MPUs are fundamentally different, despite what companies like NXP are trying to do with their "crossover" chips like RT1060 to RT1170
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Don't run Linux on it then. There are other OSes that are designed for smaller chips. But anyway I would have thought Linux could easily run on that system. Not modern desktop distros like Ubuntu of course.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > The moment you run linux on it, it gets a bit scarce. So? Run FreeRTOS[1]. [1] Unless I'm mistaken, this product already supports that
  - unmole 3y ago
    > The moment you run linux on it, it gets a bit scarce. I might be quite out of date but 16 MB of RAM was plenty to run Linux with something like buildroot. Is that no longer the case?
squarefoot 3y ago
On the Linux side, possibly some network service or IoT device running a OpenWRT like OS that does the bare minimum. Although in my opinion advertising this device as a Linux board isn't the best selling point, they do that also because today due to chips shortage and bumped prices everyone is looking for RPi alternatives, but to me it rather appears a really good board for a RTOS, in which case the available resources would be plenty. H264/5 video encoding makes it very interesting though, but I would put it behind a firewall anyway, if not because it's a unknown CPU and network stack from a unknown manufacturer.
ilyt 3y ago
Only those 2 specs ? Home routers, don't need much more to pass thru a gigabit of traffic with some firewall/NAT in place. On board that only have 100Mbit ethernet? Much less useful but you could make a sound processor (effects etc), but then pinout doesn't show any I2S.... I guess you could do some image processing but RAM will be limit on that
RobotToaster 3y ago
The RAM seems a little odd. For instance the rpi zero is 1ghz, but has 512mb of ram.
K0balt 3y ago
It can achieve > 90 percent of the computing tasks on the planet, outside of datacenters, smartphones, and PCs. But IMHO the price is the sticking point because nearly the same can be said of an a esp32-s2 (riscV) and it has better peripherals, built in WiFi and Bluetooth, and sells for <$2 soldered on a dev board. I think the fit here is for edge-AI. The asynchronous multiprocessing might actually be a winner here, since you could run your time-unpredictable algorithms on the Linux core and run your real-time needs on an ratos or bare metal on the other core… so kinda like a 2 in one device? Still not sure if that tracks for most cases though since a discrete RTOS/Bare metal core is about 0.5usd to solder next to your application processor. I think something around this price point with a strong TPU integrated might make sense, especially since it seems to compare favourably with the kendryte k210 which has proven very popular in edge-AI image processing. The question here is whether or not the vector unit will compare well with the NPU on the K210 or not, and whether the power budget is good enough for battery powered devices.
- stkdump 3y ago
  The esp32-s2 doesn't have Bluetooth.
- packetlost 3y ago
  First, the esp32-s2 is not a RISC-V chip, it's a Tensilica Xtensa ISA. Second, the S2 doesn't have an MMU and therefore cannot run Linux natively, only RTOS.

People got a lot done in the Pentium II / III era of computing. Dell shipped 32 and 64MB of RAM as the basic standard on their lines that also offered 1Ghz CPUs at the time[1]. I think it's easy to be unaware of how vastly speed outpaced memory density at some points. It's kind of what we saw a few years ago with core counts and limitations on DDR3 and early DDR4. [1]: https://dl.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_desktop/esuprt_optiplex_desktop/optiplex-gx1_setup%20guide_en-us.pdf https://dl.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_desktop/esup...

lelanthran 3y ago

> What's the selling point of 64MB of RAM with a 1GHz CPU? Well, the first server I ran had 64MB of RAM and, IIRC, a 0.6GHz CPU. Ran slackware with apache and my software was written in C as CGI scripts (generated charts on page visits using, IIRC, libgd). You can do a lot. You won't do it in JS or Python or Ruby or C# or Java, and you won't produce AAA games or ML or cryptocurrency or similar, but you can write you useful software that runs snappily on a 64MB/1GHz machine. TBH, I can't think of much that a 64MB/1GHz machine cannot do.

ravetcofx 3y ago
Found the integrated systems developer

human_banana 3y ago

The ESP32 microcontroller has 320Kb of RAM, and a dual core 240MHz CPU. It's is one of the most useful microcontrollers out there. 64MB and 1GHz CPU is a lot more and a lot faster, so IOT and edge-computing are able to process data locally.

picture 3y ago
The moment you run linux on it, it gets a bit scarce. These MMU enabled chips are pretty complicated and its really difficult to run them bare metal like ESP32. MCUs and MPUs are fundamentally different, despite what companies like NXP are trying to do with their "crossover" chips like RT1060 to RT1170
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Don't run Linux on it then. There are other OSes that are designed for smaller chips. But anyway I would have thought Linux could easily run on that system. Not modern desktop distros like Ubuntu of course.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > The moment you run linux on it, it gets a bit scarce. So? Run FreeRTOS[1]. [1] Unless I'm mistaken, this product already supports that
- unmole 3y ago
  > The moment you run linux on it, it gets a bit scarce. I might be quite out of date but 16 MB of RAM was plenty to run Linux with something like buildroot. Is that no longer the case?

squarefoot 3y ago

On the Linux side, possibly some network service or IoT device running a OpenWRT like OS that does the bare minimum. Although in my opinion advertising this device as a Linux board isn't the best selling point, they do that also because today due to chips shortage and bumped prices everyone is looking for RPi alternatives, but to me it rather appears a really good board for a RTOS, in which case the available resources would be plenty. H264/5 video encoding makes it very interesting though, but I would put it behind a firewall anyway, if not because it's a unknown CPU and network stack from a unknown manufacturer.

ilyt 3y ago

Only those 2 specs ? Home routers, don't need much more to pass thru a gigabit of traffic with some firewall/NAT in place. On board that only have 100Mbit ethernet? Much less useful but you could make a sound processor (effects etc), but then pinout doesn't show any I2S.... I guess you could do some image processing but RAM will be limit on that

RobotToaster 3y ago

The RAM seems a little odd. For instance the rpi zero is 1ghz, but has 512mb of ram.

K0balt 3y ago

It can achieve > 90 percent of the computing tasks on the planet, outside of datacenters, smartphones, and PCs. But IMHO the price is the sticking point because nearly the same can be said of an a esp32-s2 (riscV) and it has better peripherals, built in WiFi and Bluetooth, and sells for <$2 soldered on a dev board. I think the fit here is for edge-AI. The asynchronous multiprocessing might actually be a winner here, since you could run your time-unpredictable algorithms on the Linux core and run your real-time needs on an ratos or bare metal on the other core… so kinda like a 2 in one device? Still not sure if that tracks for most cases though since a discrete RTOS/Bare metal core is about 0.5usd to solder next to your application processor. I think something around this price point with a strong TPU integrated might make sense, especially since it seems to compare favourably with the kendryte k210 which has proven very popular in edge-AI image processing. The question here is whether or not the vector unit will compare well with the NPU on the K210 or not, and whether the power budget is good enough for battery powered devices.

stkdump 3y ago
The esp32-s2 doesn't have Bluetooth.
packetlost 3y ago
First, the esp32-s2 is not a RISC-V chip, it's a Tensilica Xtensa ISA. Second, the S2 doesn't have an MMU and therefore cannot run Linux natively, only RTOS.