$250 Chromebook With Ubuntu Linux Is Very Fast 117
An anonymous reader writes "The Google Samsung Chromebook was already interesting for its competitive $250 price-tag and that it can be loaded with Linux distributions beyond Chrome OS, but it turns out that its performance is particularly good, too. When loaded with Ubuntu Linux, the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual ARM SoC on the Chrome notebook had outperformed a 1.8GHz Intel Atom, a quad-core Calxeda ARM server, and a TI OMAP4 PandaBoard."
Re:250$ buys you a lot of netbook... (Score:4, Insightful)
That'd be an Ultrabook as the 'standard' of which you talk for a small light machine, which isn't really fair as the machine will be faster with an i3/i5 and DDR3. But it'll also cost 3 times as much so. The question then becomes will a $250 netbook in 2 generations beat the ultrabook (ie would you be better to buy a new $250 machine when one comes out for 3 generations than spent the same money in one lot now. That's an interesting question but not one many people would care to ask. I don't know but if you find out you can let the rest of us know.
Re:Now that ARM is faster than Atom... (Score:5, Insightful)
Catching up with atom in power or efficiency should have Intel running scared.
Well, these benchmarks don't include power consumption but when Haswell has been demoed at 8 watts running Unigine Heaven and other benchmarks of the Exynos 5 at Anandtech show it running at 8 watts while doing the single-threaded non-GPU Mozilla Kraken benchmark, you kind of have to wonder who is doing the "catching up" and who is "running scared"....
Re:250$ buys you a lot of netbook... (Score:4, Insightful)
But why? It's not like you are going to be encoding video or rending a Pixar movie on the thing. You want video playback, document editing, some gaming, and web surfing,
What's interesting is that you use as examples of "high performance" activities those things which can most easily be left running unattended, and use as low performance activities those things that need the most system performance to provide realtime interactivity. Encoding video can be done on a P90 (given enough time) and nobody will know when it is done that it took a minute or a week. Watching that video on a system that skips and jumps because the CPU/GPU cannot keep up is immediately noticeable and would be unacceptable to most people.
Re:Now that ARM is faster than Atom... (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that the limiting bottleneck of a notebook with a decent processor is almost always the disk subystem, I stopped reading. Did I miss something?