Palm Pre and Pixi hardware differences 20
The Pre and the Pixi have been on the market together for roughly 5 months now and while we all pretty much knew that the Pixi had a smaller screen, slower processor and the non-plus version lacked WiFi, some of the more nittiy gritty details might not be common knowledge. In one of the Palm Developer Day videos we got a look under the hood.
The Palm Developer Day video in question is the "Optimization Under Palm's 3D Hardware" (see the slides here and the video here) that gives developers an overview of the 3D hardware capabilities of the Pre and the Pixi. Here's what makes the two devices tick: 
It's interesting to note that not only does the Pixi have the same amount of RAM as the non-Plus version of the Pre, it does indeed have a GPU that by most indications is no slouch. Per the video, the primary reason the Pixi is slower than the Pre isn't necessarily that it's running the older ARMv6 architecture, but that the Pixi's modem requires more system memory than that in the Pre.
All of this means that the Pixi is a surprisingly capable handset, even when considering things like the lower resolution, smaller screen and memory hungry modem. When PDK based apps finally become available to Pixi owners, it seems clear that they'll be able to play 3D games in style with the rest of us.
20 Comments
I hope Pixi-2 should atleast get pre's specs from 2009. Meaning any left over processors should go to pixi. Though I would not mind if pre gets pixi's keyboard.
I've always preferred the Pixi's form factor to the Pre's. It pretty much just needs more of everything - beefier specs, screen size, keyboard size.
Engadget was calling Dell's candybar "The Pixi if it were awesome". There's potential in the form factor, but the Pixi lacks luxury.
i said in the beginning that Pixi is capable of 3D games. Why that didn't happen?
resolution.
Correct. It probably doesn't facilitate iPhone ports as well as an identical resolution (a la the Pre).
I wonder if the Pre2 will use the exact same resolution as the iPhone4?
yes even if it is capable, I don't we will see the games the pre is getting ported from iphone. They will probably only get games specifically for WebOS.
I have a pre and we recently got a pixi for my wife. minus the shortcomings of the smaller screen and fewer features the pixi seems far more touch responsive and sometimes faster (even with my pre upclocked to 600mhz), and I think is a more refined design. A larger slab with a real keyboard could be great.
I found the same thing. Here's a post to a set of videos I made documenting how I found the Pixi to be a very capabable little device:
http://forums.precentral.net/palm-pixi/215946-pre-vs-pixi-video-comparis...
I cannot see any sources to this claim: "it does indeed have a GPU that by most indications is no slouch." From what i heard even the snapdragon(qualcomm's top model) uses an old ati gpu that is way slower than the sgx530.
Pixi does not have 8GB storage. Only the Plus version, since they put the specs of the Plus version in parenthesis. They should correct it to 4GB.
Multitouch recognizes up to 5 fingers? Awesome. Now if you could only fit 5 fingers on a Pixi screen.....
I do not know much about CPUs and GPUs, but why does the Pixi have a faster graphics processor? Is it just not as good so it cannot handle 3d gaming?
excuse your face? haha I'm currently on my Sprint Pixi and ahem, I DO have 8GB >.>
fix your life and get those facts straight..
Speed doesn't always mean that it's a faster hardware. The architecture behind it, number of cores, num of pipes, paparalell processing etc matter more on CPUs/GPUs than the Mhz these days...
According to the video Palm did internal benchmarks, where the Pixi had better performance in all aspects except one. It was memory bandwidth or drawing of pxels IIRC. Of course the 20 to 30 MB less free RAM do make a difference, too, but I had the impression that was not the main factor.
There are also some differences in performance when coding openGL this way, or the other way. There are a few ways of getting what you want with openGL. The Pre has better performance when using one method, the Pixi the other way around.
Not quite Androids fragmentation degree, but it's the same concept: the Pixy can't 3D yet, because for best performance you have to code each device differently. And because of the smallish screen perhaps ;)
these would have been great handsets in 2008. but in 2009 they were behind the ball pretty much. and now in 2010 they are completely old tech. we need a new phone.
Palm is the only phone company that offers complete 3D gaming.
Apple and Palm are the onl 2 companies that offer complete 3D gaming on phones.
So, it seems they're doing pretty good so far for being "out-dated."
ps- what will you call 3D games broadcasted in 3D? 3D^2 games?
wait.
*The pre is underclocked to 500 mhz.
*The pixi runs at 600 mhz all the time.
And it seems it's GPU is 45% faster then the Pre's.
why the heck would the Pixi be slower?
-It seems that the Pre would be slower compared to the Pixi.-
Also, gaming is difficult b/c of the different aspect ratio in the screen. More squre like instead of rectangular.
Because webos does not use the gpu as of now. And the pre has a better and newer cpu which is what webos used to run.
The arm11 processor in pixi is like a pentium 4, while an arm cortex a8 in the pre is like a single core core i7 processor. A cortex a8 at 500MHz preform 50% better clock for clock(the pre processor perfoms like pixi's processor at 750 MHz). The same goes for the GPU aswell, the sgx530 is MUCH faster than the old qualcomm crap!
The frequency is not a mesurement of performance.
Sorry for bad English.
EDIT: Precentral should not compare frequency of the two different architectures.
The pre does have performance issues if it performs slower than pixi.
Precentral isn't comparing the frequencies. The above chart was released by Palm. Nowhere in this article is it comparing frequencies.
>"Per the video, the primary reason the Pixi is slower than the Pre isn't necessarily that it's running the older ARMv6 architecture, but that the Pixi's modem requires more system memory than that in the Pre. "
Well, the video is wrong, then. Because the not having as much RAM does not affect performance unless you are running out, which is not the case when you are not running apps.
The reason it is slower, is because it is using an older, less powerful CPU and GPU. Period.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to getting Smiles running on the Pixi too. It runs great on the Pre. I'm very happy with the PDK.