12-12-2020, 01:48 AM
(11-21-2020, 06:35 PM)hiimty Wrote: this begs the question: what is the projected maximum life we can ever hope to achieve, while having the Pinephone function as an actual phone? surely, if the modem must be disabled in order for the phone to not die from power loss, it can't possibly be considered a usable daily driver.The modem has some pretty low power modes, at least if we can get anywhere close to what the datasheet claims. Getting back out quick enough to catch an inbound call is possible (seen mine do it) but apparently a hard problem to get right every time. A question I haven't seen a definitive answer to is how much of the problem is the wakeup time for the A64 vs the modem. Have faith it will get sorted, it is just a software problem and folks are determined and know how to eventually beat the issues involved.
The harder problem is going to be the AllWinner CPU. All modern ARM SoC designs use a big/Little design so background processing (streaming audio, housekeeping, tracking the sensors, etc) can run all day on a charge even if the CPU runs a fair percentage of the time. We don't get that option, current kernels don't even seem to go all the way down with scaling. The datasheet implies (page 84) it starts off at 408 MHz. We can assume it is still stable clocked that slow, power consumption should be a bit better too but maybe power per instruction isn't?. Even that is not nearly as good a little core designed for 50-500MHz operation and everything in it is optimized to minimize power consumption instead of chase speed.