$250 Chromebook With Ubuntu Linux Is Very Fast 117
An anonymous reader writes "The Google Samsung Chromebook was already interesting for its competitive $250 price-tag and that it can be loaded with Linux distributions beyond Chrome OS, but it turns out that its performance is particularly good, too. When loaded with Ubuntu Linux, the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual ARM SoC on the Chrome notebook had outperformed a 1.8GHz Intel Atom, a quad-core Calxeda ARM server, and a TI OMAP4 PandaBoard."
But will it blend? first post! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:250$ 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 $250 machine when one comes out for 3 generations than spent the same money in one lot now. That's an interesting question but not one many people would care to ask. I don't know but if you find out you can let the rest of us know.
Re:250$ buys you a lot of netbook... (Score:4, Funny)
But said 15" standard laptop will be 3 inches thick, and made out of cheese and string. Come back when you have something small, light, solidly built, and as fast.
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Presumably we're comparing like-for-like in terms of price here. I can find the Samsung Chromebook from TFA for £229. In terms of Windows-loaded netbooks, the best processor I can find for that money is the Asus Eee PC 1025C, which comes with an Atom N2800.
If you can find a device with the same form factor (ultra-portable) and same price but with an Intel Core processor, link away.
Re:250$ buys you a lot of netbook... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Touche. And that would actually be the most obvious like-for-like, seeing as it's a Chromebook.
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Re:250$ buys you a lot of netbook... (Score:4, Informative)
Chromium and VLC have been working just fine on Ubuntu ARM for years (as well as Ubuntu PPC). No need for virtualized processor. They're compiled for ARM. Dropbox and Jungledisk should also compile just fine if the source is available. That's the beauty of free software.
There's a source tarball for Dropbox here [dropbox.com].
Jungledisk (never heard of it before) appears to be propretary, so fsck 'em.
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That's not the source of Dropbox, that's just the Nautilus extension. The daemon is proprietary too.
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Second, they only compare the performance to simular system configurations rather then a regular Intel CPU based netbook.
Uhh, an Atom is a regular Intel CPU based netbook. Atom was designed specifically for netbooks, in fact. I'm not sure how much more "regular Intel CPU based netbook" you want, because you can't get more regular Intel netbook than that, unless you expect them to compare it to "Ultrabooks" 2-3x the price (which aren't netbooks). Agreed, the site is terrible.
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I'm not sure how much more "regular Intel CPU based netbook" you want
I suppose he meant the usual desktop processors, such as the Core series.
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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, anything beyond that is pretty much redundant and a waste of battery life.
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.
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if you're using a P90 to encode video, it'll be unusable for a week.
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Agreed (Score:2)
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And half an hour of battery life.
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First off, that is an ugly web site.
I totally agree. Or did you mean the second link?
How complete and up-to-date is Ubuntu/ARM? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Per the discussion here [google.com](which includes a Google dev who wrote up some early instructions on running standard linuxes on this ARM Chromebook, and at least one Linaro project person, among other clueful types, Apparently mainline kernel support for the Exynos 5 SoC is expected in the near future but not 100% just yet.
As for ARM packages, you are very likely out of luck for 3rd-party binaries(eg. Flash, Oracle JVM), and may be a more or less second-class citizen in some areas(the javascript JIT compilers in su
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The open-source JVM is available though, which is very feature-complete. The open-source flash lags behind or (usually) isn't worth it, but YouTube has HTML5 videos now.
Anything Windows-oriented is unavailable (FOSS or not) like ndiswrapper (which you shouldn't need), wine (not running windows apps directly may affect you). There's KVM (Kernel Virtualization Module), but it only virtualizes ARM systems. If you must, there's bochs to run x86 on ARM, but it's slow and limited.
Other "common for
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YouTube has HTML5 videos now.
Youtube isn't the only use for Flash. What about Farmville for grandma?
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I haven't kept a close eye on ubuntu but debian armel and armhf are at about 98% while debian i386 and amd64 are at about 99.5%. Since ubuntu is based on debian i'd expect their figures to be similar.
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I have two ARM systems at home. One is QNAP TS-110 1-bay Home NAS Server powered by Debian ARM Linux and another one is Raspberry Pi powered by Raspbian(again Debian -> Linux) which serve as XBMC media center application. They are contrast to each other, But mostly I am not disappointed in finding the package due to its ARM nature. I had to compile the source of eGalax touch screen for Raspberry system (it is DIY). I was not able to find dropbox support for ARM system (it is closed source). Except a very
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Since video acceleration doesn't work, how bad are youtube and DVDs? I don't suppose 1920x1080 tv captures would play too smoothly?
Also my kids play a lot of flash games which I guess are out. Too bad Java didn't take over :(
Now that ARM is faster than Atom... (Score:5, Funny)
Now that the latest ARM chips from late 2012 are actually faster than a similarly clocked Atoms using the exact same architecture that was introduced in 2008 (well at least in some of those benchmarks, the Atom won some too), will we finally see the ARM fanboys talk-up Atom as Intel's best chip of all time?
Remember, when you say that Atom is a complete PoS and simultaneously crow that you finally beat it in performance 4 years after it hit the market, you kind of sound like someone who bragged about cheating to win the Special Olympics...
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Architecture fanboys don't use benchmarks to form opinions, they use benchmarks to form propoganda.
The only numbers that matter are whatever ones [insert favorite architecture here] is better at.
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You haven't bothered to look at Anandtech's review of this system then. Considering the Exynos SoC is sucking down 8 watts of power running a single-threaded non-GPU Mozilla Kraken benchmark, you better believe that Samsung is going to have to cut down this chip's performance to run in a smartphone power envelope.
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Ahem...you are comparing a state-of-the-art 28nm SoC on the ARM side with a several years old 45 nm Intel netbook that includes a separate chipset.
I find it hilarious that you only looked at that one part of the Anandtech review and declared victory for ARM when even you know that 32nm Medfield SoCs were on sale before the Exynos 5 even launched and have substantially better power/performance ratios than were exhibited in the Anandtech numbers.
I find it even more hilarious that you summarily ignored the Has
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Yes, today's ARM uses less power than a 45nm Intel CPU released nearly two years ago. Shocking news!
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This.
Is it really so hard to grasp that what's most relevant in ARM vs x86 comparisons (probably other arch comparisons as well) is FLOPS/W?
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This Exynos 5250 is a 32nm SoC.
The 28nm Exynos 5450 is coming out next year, with two more cores, twice the GPU and a faster clock speed.
Haswell is simply not going to compete in this area of the market, where price, power consumption and performance come together. It will compete at higher price points, maybe even at low power in single-core ULV (ultra-low-clock too) variants, but not all three.
Intel's 22nm next-generation Atoms are coming out in 2014.
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You forget the importance of efficiency. Performance per cycle is irrelevant, performance per watt is what matters.
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"....
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Please...
Yes, the original Atom chipset was a power-munching pile of crap, but that's not because they 'pushed most components out' to it. It was a perfectly standard chipset for that time, providing the memory interface and, I think, a crappy GPU. Everything a non-Atom Intel CPU of a comparable time period did the Atom did.
And my Ion HTPC uses less power at the wall than the Atom chipset used by itself, while providing a faster memory interface and faster GPU. The original Atom problems were due to crappy
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It was a perfectly standard chipset for that time, providing the memory interface
Nothing to be proud of. AMD had included memory controller in the CPU far before Intel got around to doing that. With excellent results.
Everything a non-Atom Intel CPU of a comparable time period did the Atom did.
An Atom Intel CPU should not do what a non-Atom Intel CPU does, if the Atom Intel CPU is to meet its end-user-centric goals of low power consumption of the whole system.
The original Atom problems were due to crappy chipsets, not crappy CPUs
The CPUs required the crappy chipsets. E.g. the cart part of a bullock cart has infinite mileage per megaJoule of energy consumed, supports speeds of upto 300 miles/hour so bullock cart is obviously superior
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?
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The next generation of 22nm Atoms with the new core has been delayed until 2014.
A best of breed current generation Atom (dual-core, quad-thread) is thoroughly beaten in many benchmarks by this slightly slower clock-speed, first generation, 32nm dual-core Cortex A15 product. Next year brings a lot of 28nm quad-core A15s at 2GHz including the Exynos 5450.
And because it is cheap - no Intel tax - you can get a very decent computing device using it for $250, which is a darn sight better than the pricing of Atom
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Dual core haswell ULV parts are coming in at 8-10W TDP, which is far more interesting than Atom at those power levels. That's too much for a smartphone, but almost in tablet range, and definitely in net book range.
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Let me know when an 8W Haswell is available for under $40, as it would have to cost for it to be viable for a $250 netbook.
The 8W Haswells will be used for Ultra-ultrabooks, or long-life-ultrabooks, costing at least $799.
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The cheapest ChromeBook on the market, at $199 for the whole system, has a Sandy Bridge CPU, the Celeron 847. That CPU has a published tray price of $134.
If they can put a Sandy Bridge chip in a system costing $199, then yeah, they can put Haswell in a similar system.
You don't actually think Acer or Samsung are paying the published customer tray price, do you? When a large company tells Intel "pricematch or we're going ARM", what do you think Intel does?
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Intel can't afford to pricematch against a $30 SoC for long ... however I'm surprised the Celeron 847 has such a high tray price. More likely it's available for around $60, and the quality of other components has been compromised to attain a $199 pricepoint.
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So, Intel, who owns the complete production pipeline including the fabs, producing their own 22nm chips on 300mm wafers, can't price match an ARM SoC vendor, licensing somebody else's chip, and using somebody else's 28nm fab? What you say makes no sense. Intel can put almost twice as many chips of the same size on a wafer, tends to have higher yields, and doesn't have to pay any licensing costs or middle-man costs because of their vertical integration.
If anything, Intel should be able to undercut the SoC pr
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Not much is known about Intel's yields. There have been suggestions that 22nm did not start off very well, and Intel overcame that with mass production. They're not making 22nm Atoms right now either, and in addition you forget that Samsung runs its own fabs as well.
Intel likes a very large margin on its CPU sales, does Samsung have an internal market where they're paying a 60% margin to their fab department for the SoC? Regardless, most SoC cost estimates in product teardowns put the price of ARM-based SoC
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Samsung has their own fabs, but the general case for ARM SoC vendors is TSMC. Samsung, though, probably has much less capacity than Intel; Samsung seems to only have one or two non-memory fabs, while Intel has at least three on 22nm alone, and Samsung is only now just starting to put out 28nm chips, so they're getting less chips per wafer. Samsung also has to pay for the ARM licenses, while Intel doesn't. Unless the modern Exynos is a substantially smaller chip than Haswell will be (and remembering that the
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Atom 5watts
Intel chip set 20 watts
Screw your atom
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Nietzsche said Netcraft is dead.
SVG images/graphs (Score:1)
Those are completely unreadable, the text is about 3 pixels tall. Tried zooming, didn't work.
Google currency conversions... (Score:1)
This $250 device is listed in the UK for £250 which doesn't make it that competitive compared with the cheap netbooks that can be purchased for £170 and £200 with WIndows 7 starter shovelled onto the hard disk. AND you can install Ubuntu or whatever too!
I've had a little Compaq netbook for just on 2 years now, which cost me £190 then. Ok the Atom CPU isn't much to write home about, but it works fine dual booting between Win7 Home Premium and Ubuntu. Its fast enough for all the stuf
Screen Resolution (Score:1)
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how about quake? (Score:2)
couldn't they find less exotic tests?
anyhow, the benches are from phoronix. the intel tested is the cheapest crappiest foxconn all-in-one you can find. you'd think they'd have plenty of test results from some other relevant machines too. I mean, who the fuck gives a fuck about how pandaboard does on the bench? nobody, that's who. and maybe bambino.
and anyhow, intels lowest atom pricing is.. well, it is what it is due to competition having been what it is (that's right. they're selling atom as shit cpu as th
Windows? (Score:1)
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Upgradeable? (Score:2)
I've been trying to find out if the internal storage can be upgraded. So far I've drawn a blank which is making me think that it can't (so far). For certain the RAM can't but I could live with that. Not with so little internal storage though.
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The internal storage device is an eMMC module soldered to the motherboard. Unless you have a BGA rework setup and nerves of ice, no go.
this gallery [anandtech.com] has motherboard shots.
It does support SDHC cards and USB mass storage devices.
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Isn't that the previous version though? The teardown shots I saw were here
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Series+5+3G+Chromebook+Teardown/5939/2 [ifixit.com]
Which shows a module for storage.
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There are two concurrent Samsung Chromebook versions:
The "Samsung Chromebook [google.com]" ($249) is the ARM based one that is more or less a tablet motherboard in a laptop skin.
The "Samsung Chromebook 550 [google.com]($449) is based on whatever Intel is calling their Celeron-class CPUs these days, and is the successor to the one in the teardown above. Both, to the best of my knowledge, are build like more-or-less normal thin-n-lights on the inside, so there are some swappable parts.
The one in the teardown, if memory serves, is Sam
Android apps on Chrome OS (Score:2)
As the title suggests, I'd like to know if there is any way to run Android apps on ChromeOS. If yes, that would make Chrome OS the desktop Linux OS with the largest application base... even if most apps aren't designed for desktop use.
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What's being suggested? "Ubuntu on Chromebook" isn't "Ubuntu on ChromeOS", it's a straight up dual boot with ChromeOS and Ubuntu.
Sounds good to me. (Score:2)
I'm pretty intrigued by these new chromebooks, and I am seriously considering getting one for my wife. She mostly just does web surfing, facebooking, and email checking, so I think it would be fine for her needs.
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built for linux (Score:2)
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AMD? (Score:2)
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mops the floor, then Apache (Score:2)
There's something not quite right about these benchmarks. A huge margin in FFTE is completely reversed on Apache. Often you can normalize this a bit by knowing which chip has how many cores and whether the floating point unit sucks or doesn't suck.
This discrepancy is more extreme than normal. Usually you find out that one chip or the other was hobbled by software indigestion, then the discrepancy dissipates in subsequent rounds.
Probably can run OpenArena (Score:2)
*sigh*
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I'm not affiliated with phoronix, but I'm the one that ran the benchmarks.
You can go to any Phoronix article with benchmark results and get the command line for the benchmark run.
So once I had ubuntu up and running on my Chromebook, I went on Phoronix, found a benchmark set that they ran with comparable processors (that would not take more than a few hours), and I ran it too. The results get uploaded to Open Benchmarking. Nobody is trying to trick you.
The Phoronix guys (guy?) noticed the results a few day
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Does it run Netflix in Ubuntu??? If Chrome OS can do it...
nm, I am sure I know the answer.
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