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Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

phoronix.com

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

#81

Post by 3amOpsGuy »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #77
3amOpsGuy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haha :) I keep going back to X over SSH.

Out of VNC, RDP and NX, VNC is the lame duck.

Out of RDP & NX, both require extra software but RDP is more widely re-usable (virtual box, windows etc).

The bandwidth requirements aren't the problem with X these days - a 3G connection at under 1Mbps real world is fine for reasonable display sizes, it's the round trip latency is the killer. It's such a chatty protocol, but on a LAN / WiFi it's fine and works out of the box with... scratch that, you need to install XQuartz separately since Mountain Lion. I almost forgot about that.

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

#82

Post by drivebyacct2 »

3amOpsGuy wrote: post #81
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haha :) I keep going back to X over SSH. Out of VNC, RDP and NX, VNC is the lame duck. Out of RDP & NX, both require extra software but RDP is more widely re-usable (virtual box, windows etc). The bandwidth requirements aren't the problem with X these days - a 3G connection at under 1Mbps real world is fine for reasonable display sizes, it's the round trip latency is the killer. It's such a chatty protocol, but on a…

> it's the round trip latency is the killer

Yeah, my understanding is that NX mimicks the remote end locally and then translates the result and transmits that. There's an Android app called BVNC that uses X forwarding with a local X server to do the same thing. No extra software and it's more responsive than X-forwarding.

I should've just mentioned it before, it may be of use to you.

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

#83

Post by tluyben2 »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #75
tluyben2 wrote: post #6

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!

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).

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 :)

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

#84

Post by Cowen »

somid3 wrote: post #68

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

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.

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

#85

Post by brigade »

ajross wrote: post #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 CP…

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.

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

#86

Post by ajross »

mtgx wrote: post #80
ajross wrote: post #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 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.

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).

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

#87

Post by ajross »

brigade wrote: post #85
ajross wrote: post #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 CP…

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 op…

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.

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

#88

Post by brigade »

ajross wrote: post #86
mtgx wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Snapdragon S4 Plus/Pro SoCs are 28nm and have been in phones for a while now.

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

#89

Post by brigade »

ajross wrote: post #87
brigade wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 op…

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.

The Calexia Highbank Nodes are quad core. Relative to the OMAP4 tested, Exynos 5 has a 1.4x higher clock but 1.9x better 7-zip performance and 2.3x better x264 performance. For reference, A15 has double the vector execution resources as A9 in addition to adding out of order execution. Integer execution resources remain the same (two symmetric pipelines) but gains triple issue, wider out of order, and the potential of two load/store per cycle.

So simple integer heavy workloads aren't expected to be incredibly faster from A9, just the ~40% ARM quotes and these tests back up.

Atom D5xx has two hyperthreaded cores, and hyperthreading does help a lot for x264 at least. IIRC when I tested on a single-core Atom, the hyperthreading gave x264 a 1.6x boost.

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

#90

Post by saljam »

wheaties wrote: post #64
saljam wrote: 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 zokier said. Unless it's some form of this bug: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20187.html
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