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$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."
But will it blend? first post!
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?)
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...
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
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.
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.
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.
Acer C7 Chromebook £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.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Hogwash.
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.
Jungledisk (never heard of it before) appears to be propretary, so fsck 'em.
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 days later and and posted the graphs. There was NO attempt on my part to keep the OS exactly the same as what Phoronix used in their earlier benchmark runs in the comparison. I don't have acceleration in X, so I'm using lxde...
Phoronix just posted the results because they thought they were interesting. I'm sure proper benchmarks are coming since he posted chromebook pics in that article. These are just benchmarks that some random guy (me!) ran to see how his chromebook compares to Atom/Cortex-A9.