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Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

phoronix.com

61–70 of 96 posts

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#61

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?

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.

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#62

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?

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.

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.

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#63
post #17

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 Thin…

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

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.

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#64
post #17

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 Thin…

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...

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#65
post #17

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 Thin…

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 progra…

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

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#66
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 .

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#67
post #17

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 Thin…

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 progra…

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

Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

#70

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.

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.
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