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$250 Chromebook With Ubuntu Linux Is Very Fast

Posted by timothy on from the choices-getting-nicer dept.

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."

7 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. But will it blend? first post! by luckymae · · Score: 4, Funny

    But will it blend? first post!

  2. How complete and up-to-date is Ubuntu/ARM? by timeOday · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?)

  3. Now that ARM is faster than Atom... by CajunArson · · 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...

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
    1. Re:Now that ARM is faster than Atom... by CajunArson · · Score: 4, 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"....

      --
      AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
    2. Re:Now that ARM is faster than Atom... by rbmyers · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ok, so I noticed that one system is apparently using a solid state disk and the other a conventional disk.

      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?

  4. Re:250$ buys you a lot of netbook... by bfree · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  5. Re:250$ buys you a lot of netbook... by preflex · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.