How much RAM in it?

[norseman]

Hello,

I've been reading the forums a little bit and noticed that in some cases the 2box module becomes "slow" when you modify it with a 32 GB SDCard. In one case people recommend that getting a faster SDcard should fix the problem.

Well I'm wondering based on what I know about computers what is the amount of RAM the 2Box module has and if the reason the kit is lagging noticeably is because just like a PC playing a VST it has run out of RAM because the kit has too many elements or layers to load on RAM.

This is exactly what happened to my old laptop when playing BFD. This laptop in particular had a 5400 RPM magnetic RAM and 4 GB of RAM.

Once I switched to a laptop with 16GB I could load all of the sounds to RAM (or not) because the Laptop ALSO has an SSD.

[Jman]

Actually the 2Box system is different. This is from a former thread at another forum I posted in:

I think you missed just how different this module is and what the SD card does. As an example, the OS version, all kit and instrument configurations plus all your large instrument samples, everything you think would be transferred to "RAM" resides on the card. Change the card and in about 7 seconds you have everything new that is on your new card, whatever samples, OS, kit configuration, etc. etc. is all there, not transferred, residing on the card.

This is a quote from an interview, 2009 I think .... translated from Swedish:

Rik has developed a technology that lets us stream directly from the memory card so that you can access all the sounds in real time.


The latency issue some have experienced is from introducing it via the extender plus the card. That is why the right combo is absolutely essential. And also the reason 2Box hasn't provided access to the card outside the module. This has been discussed in other threads, like this one:
http://www.2box-forum.com/index.php/topic,1136.0.html

[fishmonkey]

Actually the 2Box system is different. This is from a former thread at another forum I posted in:

I think you missed just how different this module is and what the SD card does. As an example, the OS version, all kit and instrument configurations plus all your large instrument samples, everything you think would be transferred to "RAM" resides on the card. Change the card and in about 7 seconds you have everything new that is on your new card, whatever samples, OS, kit configuration, etc. etc. is all there, not transferred, residing on the card.

This is a quote from an interview, 2009 I think .... translated from Swedish:

Rik has developed a technology that lets us stream directly from the memory card so that you can access all the sounds in real time.


The latency issue some have experienced is from introducing it via the extender plus the card. That is why the right combo is absolutely essential. And also the reason 2Box hasn't provided access to the card outside the module. This has been discussed in other threads, like this one:
http://www.2box-forum.com/index.php/topic,1136.0.html

actually there is nothing unusual about streaming the sounds from the card, in fact almost all hardware and software samplers do something similar. the thing is the audio data will be streamed into a RAM buffer of some sort. all other things being equal, a larger buffer improves how much data can be reliably streamed. more RAM is always better, since accessing the data from RAM is orders of magnitude faster than reading it from disk/card. i would be surprised if the module doesn't also cache recently used samples in RAM.

also, when you boot the module, it is very likely that one of the first things that happens is that the OS is completely loaded into RAM.

an SD card extender in good condition should not affect streaming performance, however a bad cable or connection would mess things up. it is also possible that the extender might be more susceptible to electromagnetic interference.

the issue with the cards themselves is that it is impossible to know what the real-world transfer speeds and access times will be without actually testing one.

the upsides of streaming the audio are that you can change kits very quickly, and you can use kits that are too big to fit into whatever RAM is available. some downsides are that the performance of the card reading system has a critical impact on latency, and the amount of real-time processing that can be done on the sounds without causing unacceptable latency is more limited.

[Jman]

You have an Atmel CPU AT91SAM9261. You have 48LC16M16A2 SDRam chip .... used as L2 Cache I assume. But I don't think you will find any other RAM chip on the module board. I could be wrong, I'm definitely no expert, but that is my understanding of it.

[norseman]

You have an Atmel CPU AT91SAM9261. You have 48LC16M16A2 SDRam chip .... used as L2 Cache I assume. But I don't think you will find any other RAM chip on the module board. I could be wrong, I'm definitely no expert, but that is my understanding of it.

"The external bus interface incorporates controllers for SDRAM and Static memories, with specific interface circuitry for CompactFlash and NAND flash"

[Coda]

You have an Atmel CPU AT91SAM9261. You have 48LC16M16A2 SDRam chip .... used as L2 Cache I assume.

That's definitely a good chip (SOIC) for this kind of thing, it's got every peripheral including LCD controller and sophisticated interrupts system built in. It's not particularly fast compared to reasonable modern ARM based SIOCs (single core @190Mhz vs 4-cores @1-2ghz), but it's enough to get the job done. That SDRAM chip is 16mbit (2MByte) according to my datasheets. So definitely not useful as anything other than a cache for streaming digital audio.
One thing that disappoints me a little, and I'm sure I'll be in the minority group by saying this, that 2box didn't make use of the built-in CF interface which is tons faster than any SDCard could be (The SDCARD interface is maximum 4 bits wide, while CF is 16 bits and is IDE compatible). It might have made your 'working memory card' hunts a bit more successful.

[fishmonkey]

That's definitely a good chip (SOIC) for this kind of thing, it's got every peripheral including LCD controller and sophisticated interrupts system built in. It's not particularly fast compared to reasonable modern ARM based SIOCs (single core @190Mhz vs 4-cores @1-2ghz), but it's enough to get the job done. That SDRAM chip is 16mbit (2MByte) according to my datasheets. So definitely not useful as anything other than a cache for streaming digital audio.
One thing that disappoints me a little, and I'm sure I'll be in the minority group by saying this, that 2box didn't make use of the built-in CF interface which is tons faster than any SDCard could be (The SDCARD interface is maximum 4 bits wide, while CF is 16 bits and is IDE compatible). It might have made your 'working memory card' hunts a bit more successful.

good info, thanks.

interesting to know that using CF cards was an option with that chip. i guess they decided it was a bit cheaper to use SD cards, and the performance was sufficient for the sounds they were using. future proofing with the CF card interface would have definitely been better for us tinkerers though...