New G2 HP Prime

[Steve Simpkin]

(08-17-2018 11:44 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  

(08-17-2018 06:38 AM)debrouxl Wrote:  Hi Claudio

Well, yes, unfortunately.

My intent was not to question your findings, of course, but it was more an expression of "wonder", as this goes against the spirit of openness and collaboration we've seen through the years. Hard to believe they would lock it down.
...
Complete lockdown with full crypto simply doesn't sound like an idea Tim or Cyrille would want to implement, just doesn't fit their profile.

It may not fit "their" profile, but it may be a new requirement to help protect against cheating during a test. Remember the primary market for this product is the education market. That role must be considered above all others.

[Tim Wessman]

It is not locked down and is just used for verification at this time. Note however, we DO have the ability to fully encrypt and lock the system to hell as that is part of the new chip. We DO have that tested and working. We WILL turn it on if needed. It IS a corporate security mandate (after things like firmware being loaded into mice/keyboard or printers to hack networks came to light) that we fought to get an exemption for.

Nobody dick around with exam mode.

[Claudio L.]

(08-18-2018 02:26 AM)Tim Wessman Wrote:  It is not locked down and is just used for verification at this time. Note however, we DO have the ability to fully encrypt and lock the system to hell as that is part of the new chip. We DO have that tested and working. We WILL turn it on if needed. It IS a corporate security mandate (after things like firmware being loaded into mice/keyboard or printers to hack networks came to light) that we fought to get an exemption for.

Nobody dick around with exam mode.

Now fighting for that exemption is what I'd say "fits the profile". Thanks for the clarifications.
No need for threats, however, as I think it's clear that people in this forum don't really care about cheating exams, we are more about keeping the HP legacy alive.
You might *need* to post that threat in several other forums with a much lower average age, though.

[Tim Wessman]

Not really a threat and I hope it didn't come across like that. Just a warning what will happen the first time we hear otherwise.

[StarTrekken]

Just curious, when will HP officially sell the G2 in US?
Thanks.

[mfleming]

(08-18-2018 03:01 AM)Claudio L. Wrote:  Now fighting for that exemption is what I'd say "fits the profile".

Hi Tim,

This may be the wrong thread or even the wrong venue, but is there a chance that HP might encourage third-party (likely, commercial) development on the Prime hardware platform? I'm thinking something along the lines of the old HP-41 "Blanknut" platform offering. The idea of a customizable handheld with such obvious capability aimed at niche markets would excite quite a crowd of developers.

Let a dozen Crowd Supply projects spring forth
~Mark
(300)

[stefos]

(08-18-2018 05:05 AM)StarTrekken Wrote:  Just curious, when will HP officially sell the G2 in US?
Thanks.

Probably never

Revision C came out 4 years ago

How we found out about the G2 is interesting:
Europe gets the best tech and we get
Revision C and not a peep comes out about the G2

There you have it
Stefos

[Jean-Baptiste Boric]

(08-18-2018 02:26 AM)Tim Wessman Wrote:  It is not locked down and is just used for verification at this time.

Looks like I'm not out of a hobby then. Good to hear.

(08-18-2018 06:16 AM)mfleming Wrote:  This may be the wrong thread or even the wrong venue, but is there a chance that HP might encourage third-party (likely, commercial) development on the Prime hardware platform? I'm thinking something along the lines of the old HP-41 "Blanknut" platform offering. The idea of a customizable handheld with such obvious capability aimed at niche markets would excite quite a crowd of developers.

I doubt it. The Prime's pitch is primarily about providing an integrated, universal computing platform for the classroom ecosystem and so far the closest thing they have that matches your idea is the HP StreamSmart 410 for connecting Fourier sensors. A commercial or major education entity with enough clout could probably struck a partnership with HP for things'n stuff, but there's no way HP would see a business case trying to jumpstart a third-party commercial ecosystem all by themselves.

There are calculator platforms whose characteristics/strengths align a bit better with your pitch (DM42, NumWorks), but those are quite different beasts.

[mfleming]

(08-18-2018 08:07 PM)Jean-Baptiste Boric Wrote:  There are calculator platforms whose characteristics/strengths align a bit better with your pitch (DM42, NumWorks), but those are quite different beasts.

Different beasts indeed! Programs for both are limited to the SoC internal flash & SRAM. I suppose external serial flash can be mapped to program address space, but execute in place code would be awfully slow, even if the DM42 has a four lane SPI connection. Quite paltry compared to all those megabytes and megabytes of wide SDRAM and Flash on the Prime!

Your major point of course is the impracticality from HP's point of view. A smaller company would be too much trouble to support while a larger concern might represent a marketing opportunity for themselves.

I guess we'll satisfy ourselves with your own work and the ideas of Claudio while hoping some snot doesn't break exam mode

~Mark

[grsbanks]

I've just ordered a G2 Prime from De Reken Winkel and I'm looking forward to putting it through its paces. I expect to get it around Wednesday.

[john c.]

I just got my new g2 prime today. Ordered 9 days ago from De Rekenwinkel nl.

I live in the Pittsburgh pa. area. very speedy service.
A few observations. the display is very high contrast.
the blue nd orange color used is quite a few shades
darker than my older primes Two thumbs up.

I did not receive a quick start booklet.

Did with older versions.

My charging cable did not come with a
adapter to plug in a wall socket to charge
the calculator. Charge via the cal. to laptop
port. I prefer plugging into the wall method.
Is that normal to other g2 owners ??

[Anders]

(08-28-2018 02:09 AM)john c. Wrote:  I just got my new g2 prime today. Ordered 9 days ago from De Rekenwinkel nl.

I live in the Pittsburgh pa. area. very speedy service.
A few observations. the display is very high contrast.
the blue nd orange color used is quite a few shades
darker than my older primes Two thumbs up.

I did not receive a quick start booklet.

Did with older versions.

My charging cable did not come with a
adapter to plug in a wall socket to charge
the calculator. Charge via the cal. to laptop
port. I prefer plugging into the wall method.
Is that normal to other g2 owners ??

Yep I got two G2 Friday last week and I can confirm they do not come with a wall plug. It does not matter to me since they would have shipped a EU plug anyway which I cannot use in the US.

Lacking quick start manual does not matter to me either.

- I used one of the two provided USB cable and quickly upgrade to the latest firmware from July. Piece of cake!

All in all totally agree with you:
- Delivery was super fast with expedited shipping - less than a week.

The G2 is:
- snappier noticeable faster when you do something more complex
- screen is beautiful with better contrast compared to G1 (subjective)
- the keyboard have the new colors providing better contrast that make it easier to read
- it does have G2 in a circle printed on the back

In summary a really nice upgrade!

Very well done HP!

I'm giving one to my oldest daughter who is starting college, but am keeping the other one for myself

[toml_12953]

(08-28-2018 02:09 AM)john c. Wrote:  I just got my new g2 prime today. Ordered 9 days ago from De Rekenwinkel nl.

It figures. I ordered mine from there on Aug 15th and haven't gotten it yet in northern NY State.

[Tim Wessman]

(08-28-2018 03:02 AM)Anders Wrote:  I did not receive a quick start booklet.

That should be the case for all SKU worldwide from memory.

Quote:My charging cable did not come with a
adapter to plug in a wall socket to charge
the calculator. Charge via the cal. to laptop
port. I prefer plugging into the wall method.
Is that normal to other g2 owners ??

Yes, I think one plug will be included in the US only SKU, but that will most likely disappear over time as well. Plug into any standard USB plug, including the wall ones, and you can charge. (as it has always been) Most people just threw them away since everyone already has places to plug a USB cable...

Quote:- screen is beautiful with better contrast compared to G1 (subjective)

The screens are identical between later production Prime units. That did not change. Maybe a very slight difference between manufactured units when it changed to a difference screen supplier. You'd have a very hard time telling it apart though.

[ijabbott]

(08-28-2018 03:02 AM)Anders Wrote:  Yep I got two G2 Friday last week and I can confirm they do not come with a wall plug. It does not matter to me since they would have shipped a EU plug anyway which I cannot use in the US.

The older European model (G8X92AA#B1S) includes the sort of 100-240V 50/60Hz adapter that has removable inserts to accommodate different countries' mains sockets, although the European model only includes "Europlug" (CEE 7/16 Alternative II) and "UK" (BS 1363) inserts.

Any good quality USB charger should work, despite the dire warnings in the QSG about only using the supplied charger or a replacement from HP!

[Stevetuc]

If anyone from UK needs a new prime G2 , Oxford Educational Supplies currently have 4 in stock. I just purchased from there (I have no other link to them)

Order from this link: http://www.studentcalculators.co.uk/acat...ators.html

Contact James on info@oxford-educational.co.uk or phone to ensure you are sent a G2 and not rev C!

[Eddie W. Shore]

I hope to see the G2 generation sold in United States stores soon.

[smp]

(08-28-2018 01:04 PM)Eddie W. Shore Wrote:  I hope to see the G2 generation sold in United States stores soon.

A big AMEN to that! :lol:

smp

[Anders]

(08-12-2018 04:20 PM)StephenG1CMZ Wrote:  

(08-12-2018 10:25 AM)Dirk.nl Wrote:  Hello Stevetuc,
I performed the savage benchmark test on my HW-A and HW-D (G2) Prime.
HW_A between 548 and 567 mS
HW_D between 195 and 204 mS
On both machines A = 2500.00005268

See the program below.

Math7,
I have a bad camera, but the exterior is exactly that of HW-C with the improved color scheme!

Code:


EXPORT SAVAGE()
BEGIN
A:=1;
B:=TICKS;
FOR I FROM 1 TO 2499 DO
  A:=TAN(ATAN(EXP(LN(√(A+1)^2))));
END;
B:=TICKS-B;
END;

Note.
I do not want to open the Prime to look at the type numbers of the CPU and memories.
The lion battery is 2000mAh (7.4 Wh) instead of 1500mAh.

My implementation of the Savage benchmark gives a different constant - but it also provides an exact CAS version too, allowing CAS performance to be evaluated too. http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-9626.html
But I have no hardware to report results on

So I ran your savage benchmark v0.2 from the s/w library (http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-9626.html) on a brand new (July 2018 f/w) fully charged HP Prime G2 on battery only (not connected to the PC via USB cable). When finished, I connected USB and ran HP connectivity kit to share the terminal output (snipped), attached. I ran it a few times and it comes out more or less the same, but I gave a rough range reflecting the max and min values I observed. Well, I did not have time to do a full stats analysis on this so, I'm giving a very much unscientific range lol . (Someone could perhaps write a program to see what the average and standard deviation is running the benchmark suite 100 times or so.)

Anyway, here are the G2 scores:
PPL1: 0.187_s range +/- 0.05_s
Make: 0.209_s range +/- 0.05_s
CAS1: 2.457_s range +/- 0.2_s
CAS2: 1.831_s range +/- 0.3_s

To complete the picture running the same Savage v0.2 on my G1 rev C (dark blue key board) I get:
PPL1: 0.714_s range +/- 0.1_s
Make: 0.953_s range +/- 0.1_s
CAS1: 9.333_s range +/- 1_s
CAS2: 7.254_s range +/- 0.9_s

In other words with the G2 we get about a 3.5 to 4.5 x speed up (for both CAS and PPL) over G1 rev C.

Since I am using the same f/w from July on both I think the difference simply comes down to faster H/W and I suspect almost all comes from a faster more efficient CPU, but some may also be from a potentially faster RAM - no idea (need to open both to compare h/w and I am not going to do that ).

REALLY NICE upgrade!

Well done HP!

[cyrille de brébisson]

Hello,

I was very surprised to see the speed difference between the G1 and G2.
CPU frequency of G2 is faster (about 30% from memory). And it has more cache and a better micro architecture... But nothing that warant a *2 or more extra speed (no super scalar for example).
It's RAM is better, yes, but in a tight loop benchmark, only the cache is used, so it does not mater...

Extra speed in the CAS, when it comes to floating points (invert a 100*100 floating matrix for example), or in the advanced grapher/3D grapher are easely explained by the presence of the FPU (which is used by these 3 items)...

But extra speed in Home is not as Home does not use floats.

My best guess is that the extra speed come from a better OS.
First G2 has way way less threads running around. Saving a lot of CPU time.
But more importantly, the OS did not come with malloc and I had to recreate the whole memory allocation system, and I think that my code is way better than the BestaOS one.
Since both PPL and CAS programs are HUGELY dependent on mallocs, this probably makes up for a lot of the speed up...

Cyrille