Comment by nabilhat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nabilhat | Hacker News Reader

> The PineNote is one of, if not the, most powerful e-ink device available on the market. It shares in much of the Quartz64’s pedigree, sporting the same RK3566 quad-core A55 SoC paired with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB eMMC flash storage.

There's so much opportunity in the e-ink space just waiting for something to crack open. E-ink devices have felt so much like the TI-84 of the tablet world, or inkjet printers 25 years ago - overpriced and underpowered.

There's a lot of work ahead for the Pine community to get to performance on par with existing e-ink tablets. Remarkable's setting the example now, which is frankly quite an achievement on two 1.2GHz cores with 1GB RAM. Pine's twice as many, ~50% faster cores, with 4x the RAM should help.

reMarkable 1 is 1GHz single-core with 512MB of RAM, and that’s entirely sufficient for what it’s primarily designed for, writing. PDF rendering is the main thing that can be slow, agonisingly so in some cases. I imagine that’s the main reason why they boosted reMarkable 2 to dual-core 1.2GHz and 1GB of RAM. (It wasn’t for things like startup time—https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jfgpqw/rm... shows both 1 and 2 taking about 20 seconds, with 2 actually the slower by a second or so.)

Quad-core 1.8–2GHz and 4GB of RAM is, if used fairly sensibly, massive overkill for most purposes e-paper has been used for so far, with image-heavy PDFs being the most likely exception (incidentally, I’m not sure if such rendering can be parallelised or not). It’s easily enough to run full desktop environment stuff. So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of it. Screen latency is certainly the key to the whole puzzle.

Since PineNote will have an actual GPU unlike reMarkable, I do expect that it will handle many PDF's without much trouble.

They say they're deciding between plasma mobile and a customized full plasma as an interface so maybe hopefully they can actually provide a low-latency input layer which seems hard to do on Android.

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