Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung_chrome_a15&num=1

by mtgx • 14 years ago

133 94 14 years ago

k_bx• 14 years ago

I wish there will be lots of cheap 13-15" ARM ultrabooks on market one day...

ivany4• 14 years ago

Coming in even or slightly faster (in most benchmarks) than an Intel Atom D525 from over two years ago is "crazy fast"? I'm impressed with the Chromebook overall and I think it's a cool product but talk about a bait-and-switch title.

dspillett• 14 years ago

I think people are reporting this relative to expectations rather than absolutely: they assumed it woudl be slower due to the lower cost and lower power consumption but the results defied that expectaion.

ivany4• 14 years ago

$250 is not exceptionally low cost for a netbook. Furthermore the power dissipation of the chromebook under load is only slightly better than a comparable atom system [1]. The idle performance is better, I will give them that. Still, the death of x86 in the face of ARM for performance-sensitive environments (even when power consumption is a factor) has been greatly exaggerated.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-...

davedx• 14 years ago

Not surprised by the title given the site itself, more advertising than content. Ugh

itry2• 14 years ago

The A15 seems to be the same weight as the Macbook air. I always thought about buying an MBA, but I feared the hassle of installing Linux on it.

Is the A15 my future development machine? All my development happens in ssh and firefox. So performance is not an issue.

crayola2• 14 years ago

I am also starting to consider this for development, but I need more assurance that it is a viable option. Does everything mostly work out of the box, or would there be a lot of tinkering / troubleshooting required, e.g. because of the somewhat non-standard nature of running ubuntu on ARM architecture? What about drivers, e.g. for wifi and trackpad?

ivany4• 14 years ago

After running debian on an ARM box for the past ~5 years, my experience has been pretty favorable. If there's a solid community following (which is a good bet with this product given the hype around it) the drivers should be a non-issue. Installation went very smoothly for me. Everything else, if it can get built from source, should be fine. On my box apt-get install "just works" for almost all of the software I use, and maybe 75% of make installs go smoothly with relatively little tinkering required.

For getting actually work done, I use an x86 laptop. I wouldn't ever go back to using a netbook or any non-mainstream notebook with iffy linux support. It's just not worth your time to deal with technical issues. Buy the best tools that you can find (best being what works for you).

mtgx7• 14 years ago

Ubuntu is probably the most optimized distro for the ARM architecture out there. Canonical is really pushing support for ARM.

gabemart• 14 years ago

>All my development happens in ssh and firefox. So performance is not an issue.

Does that really bear out? I like the idea of a low-powered netbook connecting to a high-powered server for development, but in my (very limited) experience it's a pain.

I have two machines, and old laptop with an AMD RM-70 and a Thinkpad X41 with a Pentium M 1.6 Ghz.

On both machines, using Firefox is a painful experience because the performance is so bad. Using chrome is pretty good.

I've been thinking about buying a newer netbook with better battery life, but the performance of newer low-powered mobile CPUs doesn't seem that much greater than the systems I already have.

itry2• 14 years ago

> Does that really bear out?

Why wouldnt it? Been doing it for years now and cannot think of any other way of development anymore.

etherealG2• 14 years ago

I think performance is still an issue. currently there are no gpu accelerated drivers if I understand correctly for non-chromeos linux, so until someone puts the effort into making that work.

rational_indian• 14 years ago

>non-chromeos linux

Or you could just use the pre-installed linux kernel underneath a distribution of your choice.

tluyben23• 14 years ago

What's with the only 6.5 hour battery life? I would buy it if it had >=9.

Edit: it's a serious question :) I am really wondering why the Nexus 10 has 9 hours and this 6.5?

Please Google, add a 3rd 'chromebook without chrome os' which is a Nexus 10 (Android but hopefully soon Ubuntu hacked) with a click-on keyboard (with battery) for $350. Thanks!

AngryParsley• 14 years ago

Given the same volume, a tablet has more space for batteries than a laptop. A laptop has to use space for the hinge, keyboard, trackpad, peripheral ports, and display. Worse, you can't fit batteries behind a laptop display without ruining the balance. On the other hand, a tablet is practically a screen with a ton of batteries behind it.

Here's some real-world data: The 3rd gen iPad has a 42 watt-hour battery. The 11" Air has a 35 watt-hour battery. The Air is 25% larger in one dimension and over 50% heavier, but it still can't fit the same amount of batteries as the iPad.

And of course tablets typically have slower processors, less memory, and less flash than laptops. Their lower specs mean tablets draw less power.

With so much going against them, I'm surprised that some laptops manage to come close to tablets in battery life.

ivany4• 14 years ago

Intel chipsets and processors have gotten very, very good with power management. With reasonable screen brightness and Wifi enabled, my X220 idles at ~8.5W. With a 90Wh battery this gives me ~10 hours on a plane, which is more than I can handle in one go. A tablet TDP (iPad) is about 5W which is 2x better. This is 2X better for a device with smaller screen, no spinning drive, no keyboard, and a much weaker processor.

Intel has been improving their power efficiency dramatically in the past few years. They have the most advanced fabs and arguably the best technology in the semiconductor industry. All the talk is about ARM and low-power computing but Intel is, watt for watt, a serious threat in the high-performance computing market.

mtgx7• 14 years ago

It only has a 4,000 mAh (15 Whr) battery, smaller even than Nexus 7's 4,300 mAh battery, and considering it also has a much larger 12" screen (more than twice screen area), the battery life would also be smaller than Nexus 7.

Nexus 10 has a 9,000 mAh battery, which is also used to compensate for the 2560x1600 resolution. iPad 3/4 has 11,500 mAh and it's pushing 1 million fewer pixels for comparison's sake.

But I agree, Google needs to rectify this in next year's ARM Chromebook. They need to use a battery large enough to hold for 10h (and hopefully maintain, or lower the price). If they use this big.Little chip from Samsung next year, it might be easier to achieve that:

http://androidheadlines.com/2012/11/samsung-8-core-big-littl...

jemeshsu• 14 years ago

I hope Google will partner with ASUS for its next chromebook. Or even Lenovo. I had bad experience with Samsung hardware.

jsnell2• 14 years ago

Please don't try to compare battery capacity by looking at just the current*time. That's an irrelevant number if the voltages aren't the same. The Chromebook has a 30Wh battery, which is twice the size of Nexus 7's.

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

a Nexus 10 (Android but hopefully soon Ubuntu hacked) with a click-on keyboard (with battery) for $350.

I would weep.

I would love to pay someone to design a chasis and a bluetooth keyboard holder for the Nexus 10 (say on something like Shapeways).

tluyben23• 14 years ago

Yeah I was working with a friend (industrial designer) on that for the S2 (as I want that as well), but let's work on this instead :)

muyuu• 14 years ago

Is RAM upgradeable? does it take SATA HDs?

gsnedders2• 14 years ago

Dunno about RAM, I believe it takes mSATA drives. Waiting for someone to open it up to see how viable it is to upgrade.

WatchDog• 14 years ago

Here is a tear down: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-...

The ram and nand is soldered to the board. It does have SD card expansion though.

saljam3• 14 years ago

I got mine last week, and I've been using it as my main machine since then.

I put on a small Debian-based chroot and installed Guacamole[1]*, so I can use my favourite editor and X11 programs within a Chrome tab.

Compiling large C/C++ programs takes a while, but the Go compilers (what I mostly use) work really well. And I can always SSH into beefier machines (Linode/University) if I ever need to.

This replaced a Thinkpad which cost 5 times as much and broke in less than 13 months. So far I'm not missing the Thinkpad. (Well, maybe the 3 button TrackPoint)

[1] http://guac-dev.org

iso-8859-1• 14 years ago

Where did you learn how to set up the chroot jail? Any tricks necessary?

itp• 14 years ago

I haven't tried it myself, but http://technoticraccoon.com/post/27876540798/how-to-create-a... looks like it may be the way to go.

saljam3• 14 years ago

I used Debian's Multistrap on another computer to make the chroot. I just copied it into it's own directory somewhere on /home and used it from there.

You'll need to enable dev-mode, and you'll probably need to remount the partition it's on without the noexec option. It's a pretty standard chroot from there on.

I can write up the process somewhere or share the filesystem if there's enough interest.

melling• 14 years ago

Can you quantify the differences in compile speeds between Go and C++ on the device? In particular, I'm interested in using Go to replace some of my scripts.

etherealG2• 14 years ago

I would hazard a guess at at least an order of magnitude, based on reading about go's approach. even more depending on the dependancies.

wheaties2• 14 years ago

Ugh. I read this and cry inside. Perfectly brilliant idea that I didn't even think of.

Why? I just purchased a new ultra book burdened by Windows 8 pre-installed. If I switch to the legacy BIOS the machine won't boot up, period. The only way to get the machine to work is through Windows 8. No installing Linux, no changing firmware, no nothing. Wonderful little box that's magnificently useless for systems level programming...

crayola2• 14 years ago

What machine is this? Do you know if other models of new windows 8 ultrabooks & tablets are affected, or is it just that one?

zokier2• 14 years ago

Why would you switch to legacy BIOS mode? Linux support UEFI just fine afaik.

saljam3• 14 years ago

What zokier said. Unless it's some form of this bug: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20187.html

orik• 14 years ago

I'm

autotravis2• 14 years ago

yes, you are.

Too• 14 years ago

ARM processor running Ubuntu? What kind of applications can you run on that? (Genuine question)

Symmetry2• 14 years ago

Any kind of application you have the source code to, which is nearly everything in Ubuntu repositories.

kibwen• 14 years ago

With the caveats that the application must be written in a language whose compiler/interpreter seamlessly supports ARM, and whose dependencies all take ARM into account wherever architecture-specific code is necessary.

potkor• 14 years ago

Mostly everything except Flash and proprietary games.

kzrdude2• 14 years ago

No Skype.

mark_l_watson2• 14 years ago

I should be able to figure this out for myself, but I will ask anyway: is 16GB SSD really enough to support Ubuntu and a development environment?

At a minimum, I would need Ruby+JRuby+Clojure+editors an an IDE. I could probably live with just 4 or 5 extra GBs for project files and whatever my current writing project is.

codesuela• 14 years ago

Probably not unless you cloudsource your project files

ebiester• 14 years ago

However, it looks like it has an SD card socket as well as a USB 3.0 slot. That means you could put a 32GB SD card in there and have plenty of room for projects. If that ounce is too important, you could probably get away with an Xubuntu distribution that's fairly stripped down.

mark_l_watson2• 14 years ago

That is true: I could just leave a 32GB card in permanently. No reason to remove it.

kzrdude2• 14 years ago

It sounds like it will be fine.

autotravis2• 14 years ago

It would be enough for me. I've got an assortment of dev stuff installed under Ubuntu 12.10 right now and I'm clocking in at 5.6 GB.

ksec• 14 years ago

I wonder how much more performance can we squeeze off from compiler. Since x86 had the advantage from years of tuning. But if a Ivy Bridge of upcoming Haswell was throw into the chart i guess ARM as a performance solution still has a long long way to go.

naner• 14 years ago

Does anybody know how well the Mali drivers work on vanilla Linux (non-Android, non-Chrome Linux)?

As a longtime Linux guy, these ARM machines (and the similar tablets) are enticing. I'm finding conflicting reports on the drivers, though. It appears they were closed-source, that there is a project to reverse engineer them, and also I found a website (malideveloper.com) where they appear to have source code officially available...

randallu2• 14 years ago

Only the kernel code is available on malideveloper.com though you can probably obtain binaries for the userland stuff (EGL, GLESv2) easily enough. ChromeOS is close enough to normal Linux (normal libc, etc) that it should be possible without too much hackery.

gregsq• 14 years ago

I don't know much but it's a bit of a mess. You're right that there's a reverse engineering effort but it's against the 400 GPU, not the 704 in the Exynos. Samsung has been under quite a bit of pressure to open up the GPU code, and they've acquiesced to two binary blobs. See the Arndaleboard in ref below.

ARM have released code but it requires the full DDK which is not for general use. It's only available to partners.

BTW, in this link is a full linux Jelly Bean android repository. Except for the blobs, which are binary.

http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

One of the reasons the Android emulator is slow, it's because it has to emulate an arm chip to x86 instructions. So if I'm running an arm pc as my main dev pc... Would the emulator run magically fast? Like unicorns, rainbows and such?

mtgx7• 14 years ago

My guess is they would have to make a version of the SDK for ARM, and they haven't yet. But they may soon enough as these ARM chips get closer to PC-like performance, and more people buy ARM machines.

whalesalad• 14 years ago

Isn't the entire point of the JVM: "write once, deploy everywhere" ???

Emulating the architecture makes sense from the standpoint that you want your development and 'production' (ie, the devices/handsets) to be the same ... but the Android emulator is INCREDIBLY slow. The juice is not worth the squeeze.

Niten• 14 years ago

Dalvik isn't the JVM, and Android is more than Dalvik.

Android applications can also rely on ARM binaries developed against the NDK, so full ARM emulation is required in order to realistically test these.

randallu2• 14 years ago

There used to be a "simulator" build of Android, where all of Android got shoved into one process, but it was flaky and broken as of Android 1.0 and never got revived.

For the things I've done on Android (games, slideshows, etc) I've been able to exclusively use GL and not the Android UI toolkit, so it's simple for me to have a "desktop" target and do all of my real work there, occasionally building for device and testing...

aviraldg• 14 years ago

I guess you meant "was slow." As of now, the Android emulator ships with an Intel Atom image that uses Intel HAXM tech for native execution (and is much faster than using the ARM image/emulator) on an x86 machine.

zurn• 14 years ago

The emulator is qemu-based, and so is kvm. And, luckily the Cortex-A15 feature list has "hardware virtualization". And, quick googling shows there's ARM virtualization support for linux. And, this has already been done for android/x86. So all the major bits and pieces are there.

IgorPartola• 14 years ago

Have you checked out the Android-x86 project [1]? I remember, they were able to deliver some nice performance gains using an x86 emulator vs the ARM based emulators.

[1] http://www.android-x86.org/

ajross3• 14 years ago

Teasing out some inferrences:

The comparison to the Intel D525 is really unfortunate, as that's a 2.5 year old, 45nm Pine Trail box with a 13W TDP. The low power 22nm Ivy Bridge cores are only 14W, so I'd really wanted to have seen a comparison to a more recent CPU.

The Exynos wipes the floor on the parallel NAS tests. I'm not sure why exactly.

The Atom core has known issues with floating point relative to desktop CPUs, and the A9 was never particularly good at it. So the FFTE results showing the A15 about 50% faster than Atom and 2x faster than A9 are a surprise. It's almost what I'd expect to see from a desktop box at that.

On the other hand, the 7-zip and x264 tests are integer dominated and largely cache-bound, and the A15 doesn't show itself off particularly well here, mostly matching the A9 and Atom per-clock. Yawn. (This is an area where all these CPUs get toasted by Ivy Bridge, btw -- remember that 14W TDP?)

The "Smallpt Global Illumination Renderer" and "C-Ray" tests (which I don't know anything about per se) shows everyone about the same (and for Smallpt 2x as fast as PandaBoard). So I'm going to guess this means the tests are DRAM-bound, and thus infer that the A15 has a similar memory bandwidth to Atom (probably 2x 32 bit vs. the Pine Trail 1x 64 bit channels). That's not great, honestly, as it's still about half of what you can get with a desktop part. But then DRAM refresh draws power, so may not have been an option for the Chromebook .

mtgx7• 14 years ago

14W TDP is still too high, when a dual core A15 gets 4W at most. I doubt the IVB you're talking about is more than 3x faster than A15. Intel also has an advantage in process right now, and I'm not sure they will have it in the future. I think 14nm will be delayed, while others will catch-up to Intel on 14nm, and they might launch 14nm chips in the same time with Intel's 14nm chips, around 2015. We'll see.

ajross3• 14 years ago

Too high for what? Note that the backlight on these devices is probably 6+ watts already. And TDP isn't a good comparison for "max power" (and it's down right awful for "typical power") estimates. It's a thermal number saying what you should design your packaging for. The point being that the Netbook being compared corresponds in the modern world to a much more performant ("ultrabook", sigh) system at the same power draw.

As far as process nodes go, I'm not sure what you're citing as evidence there. Intel has been getting farther ahead with each node in the recent past. They launched 22nm more or less simultaneously with TSMC's 28nm logic (who themselves have a good lead over the rest of the industry!). Six months on, all you need to do is walk into a store to find 22nm digital logic in PCs everywhere. I don't believe there are any sub-32nm ARM SoCs in consumer devices quite yet (the Exynos-5 in the linked article is 32nm I believe).

brigade3• 14 years ago

7-zip and x264 make almost perfect use of additional cores, so it makes sense that a quadcore beats a dualcore. (aside: I rather wish that Phoronix actually mentioned how much a given test benefits from multiple threads, single-threaded tests are presented next to multithreaded tests when comparing chips with different architectures and core counts without any comment or recognition.)

Additionally, x264 is heavily optimized for x86 and nowhere near as much for ARM. 7-zip is probably similar.

For floating point, A15 has double the execution resources as A9 (two symmetric floating point pipelines each capable of a FMA per cycle) so that's no surprise to me.

ajross3• 14 years ago

Exynos-5, OMAP and Atom D5xx are all dual-core CPUs. And they all get about the same performance per clock in those tests. I don't think parallelism is a determiner -- I went with "cache-bound" as my guess. And again, this is a spot where I'd really like to see a comparison with something other than Pine Trail. One assumes the L3 on Ivy Bridge would be a big help.

somid3• 14 years ago

Say, for office users is open office the predominant office application suite used by these books, or to they virtual machine m$ office? I ask because i am currently a student

Cowen• 14 years ago

On Chrome OS, Google Docs is the go-to office application.

Once you install a different OS on it, you're probably going to be falling back on OpenOffice.

silentmars• 14 years ago

I wish I could pay say, $300, and have it come with a higher resolution screen.

kindalu• 14 years ago

i5 notebook (ex: MBA) is 3 times faster. (222ms vs 711ms)

http://liliputing.com/2012/10/benchmarking-the-249-samsung-c...

Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

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