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Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
71–80 of 96 posts
Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
#72Does 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…
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.
Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
#73One 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.
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...
Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
#74Does 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…
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.
Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
#75What'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!
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).
Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ah, that sucks then. Having done stuff with a BeagleBoard with everything on an SD card (even a class 10 one!) it's horrifically slow. Though perhaps with the OS on the built-in NAND and /home on an SD card would give not-horrific performance...
Or you could read the article for a comparison of this to the BeagleBoard.
Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on whether your use of Firefox is for Javascript or server-side scripting. Running heavy non-minified Javascript with caching disabled is much more pleasant on a fast machine.
Run Firefox on the server and export the display over the network to the weedy laptop. Depending on the technology used, exporting sound can be an hour of fiddling about to get it setup first time around.
I'd rather get hit in the crotch than use Firefox over X forwarding. Slow on top of slow. There is some interesting work with NX and NX-like solutions that make it much more tolerable.
Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is true: I could just leave a 32GB card in permanently. No reason to remove it.
The only problem is the way the SD card sticks out so far, it's pretty frustrating
Yeah, this. I've been using the Chromebook as a mobile dev device since the week it came out (lucky enough to get in on the original Play orders) and the primary frustrating thing about this box is that an inserted SD card sticks almost halfway out of the case.
I was hoping the device would allow sdcards to be fully inserted as is the norm on most PC laptops, so I could just insert a hefty 32GB card and treat it as almost internal storage. But nope, Samsung can't not take a design idea from Apple, even when it is one of their occasionally bad ones.
Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
#79One 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?
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.
Re: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
#80Teasing 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 CP…
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.