
Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast - mtgx
http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung_chrome_a15&num=1
======
saljam
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>

~~~
wheaties
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...

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

~~~
wheaties
Which ones? I've tried Ubuntu and Mint but not Fedora. I tried googling it but
all I ended up with was a several pages of articles talking about UEFI and the
secure boot without a single link TO a Linux that did it. I'm dying to know
'cause I can't stand another minute on Windows 8.

~~~
zokier
I haven't actually tried Arch on UEFI, but their wiki page seems fairly
extensive on the topic. Ubuntu documentation also shows UEFI support, but
their documentation is bit vague.

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firm...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface)

<https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UEFI_Bootloaders>

Of course I wouldn't be terribly surprised if your UEFI has some _bug_ that
prevents Linux from booting.

------
ajross
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 .

~~~
brigade
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.

~~~
ajross
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.

~~~
brigade
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.

------
tluyben2
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!

~~~
mtgx
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...](http://androidheadlines.com/2012/11/samsung-8-core-big-little-
exynos-cortex-a15-cortex-a7.html)

~~~
jsnell
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.

~~~
mtgx
It has a 2 cell battery. I doubt it's 30W.

~~~
jsnell
So when I suggested that mAh wasn't the optimal unit for measuring capacity,
the implication wasn't that you should measure by number of cells instead. It
has a 30Wh battery as even minimal research would show:

[http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mobile/Google/Chromebook...](http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mobile/Google/ChromebookA15/DSC_0706.jpg)

------
ivany
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
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.

~~~
ivany
$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-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-review-
testing-arms-cortex-a15/7)

~~~
mtgx
A15 is 40-65% faster than Atom and uses half the power consumption, according
to your link. So yes, I'd say that's pretty impressive at its level.

Also, this specific Chromebook is higher quality than those netbooks. It's
more like an ultrabook in terms of design. Not to mention that it has twice
the battery life of those netbooks under normal usage.

------
itry
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.

~~~
crayola
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?

~~~
ivany
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).

------
vibrunazo
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?

~~~
whalesalad
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
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.

------
mark_l_watson
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.

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

~~~
EwanToo
The only problem is the way the SD card sticks out so far, it's pretty
frustrating

~~~
georgemcbay
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.

------
naner
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...

~~~
gregsq
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>

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

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

~~~
kibwen
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.

~~~
Symmetry
Again, nearly everything in the Ubuntu repository.

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

------
somid3
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
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.

------
ksec
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.

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

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

[http://liliputing.com/2012/10/benchmarking-
the-249-samsung-c...](http://liliputing.com/2012/10/benchmarking-
the-249-samsung-chromebook.html)

------
muyuu
Is RAM upgradeable? does it take SATA HDs?

~~~
gsnedders
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
Here is a tear down: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-
xe303-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-review-
testing-arms-cortex-a15/3)

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

~~~
gsnedders
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...

~~~
gvb
It has 16GB of on-board flash behind a flash/SATA interface chip, basically a
16GB SSD as parts on the board (more compact and cheaper than a replaceable
2.5" drive). That is plenty big for the OS, lots of programs, and your home
directory as long as you don't go overboard with pictures and videos. Those
should go "in the cloud" or on a SD card.

------
orik
I'm

~~~
autotravis
yes, you are.

