$250 Chromebook With Ubuntu Linux Is Very Fast

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."

How complete and up-to-date is Ubuntu/ARM?

[timeOday]

This sounds like a potentially fun, cheap device. Does Ubuntu for ARM have all the same packages as x86? (From a check of the Ubuntu ARM web page it appears a lot of the focus for ARM is on the Server distro?)

Re:Now that ARM is faster than Atom...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the Atom also uses 10 times the power... and deliberately hides that fact, by pushing most components out to the north bridge, so that the Atom looks small and cold. Open an Atom system, and you'll be surprised, that the north bridge needs active cooling, while the CPU doesn't.

That's because of this.

You have to add the NB to the calculation. And yes, processing-power-per-watt-wise, the Atom always was, and still is a piece of shit in comparison.

There is no discussion that the ARM is slower. But you can stack a damn 10 of 'em on top of each other, including "NB", before you even reach the power consumption of the Atom/NB combination. And then the ARM kicks the Atom's ass fair and square.

But of course it's sooo convenient, to keep clinging to that nice trick/lie that Intel (a notorious liar) created.

Re:250$ buys you a lot of netbook...

[bfree]

Acer C7 Chromebook [amazon.co.uk] £199 from amazon.co.uk (for a sterling comparison as you said £229). This has a Sandy Bridge Celeron so it's a cut back Core processor but it would be the one I'd be most interested in seeing benchmarked like-for-like with this $250 Arm Chromebook.