Hopefully this will put some pressure on manufacturers to bump specs on their lowest end offerings. Dell's $300 Windows laptop offering right now for instance is built with a dual core Celeron, which is hard to excuse when most phones and tablets at lower prices are at least tri or quad-core.
Once the bottom end baseline is finally moved up to quad or hex-core, there should be a stronger drive for software not aimed at users with heavier workloads to be multithreaded well.
It seems the "core myth" has replaced the "MHz myth" among computer buyers. Those low-end quad core phones and tablets are most likely using "little" ARM cores like the Cortex-A53 or A55. These cores are very small in terms of die area which why you can get four of them very cheaply.
Meanwhile that dual core Celeron is using Intel's performance cores which are much larger and several times faster than those ARM cores. Even for multithreaded workloads the Celeron will run circles around cheap quad core ARM SoCs.
I have a Chromebook (Samsung 4) with a Celeron N4020 2/2 1.1GHz ("up to 2.8GHz"), 6W TDP processor. It's not going to blow anyone away with its performance, but it's entirely adequate and I love that it has all-day battery life from a $100 device (mine was $92.44 delivered&taxed on sale; the typical street price is $119).
I don't want the lowest end offerings to become 15W TDP chips in $300 laptops. I think there's a perfectly valid place for 6W chips in $100 devices, which brings computing access to more people and places.
9W Alder Lake mobile CPUs start at 5 cores (1P+4E), even for Pentium/Celeron. 6W class will apparently be E-core only and go up to 8 cores, unclear what the minimum is since details haven't been announced yet. Overall, core counts should be going way up on average this generation.
These "Windows" laptops make perfectly fine Linux machines. (Even web browsing with Firefox tends to be very manageable on as little as 4GB RAM and even a slow CPU.) It's still unreasonably hard to install an alternative OS on a Chromebook and not end up with a useless toy that will literally prompt you to wipe its storage clean at every subsequent boot unless you quickly press some obscure key combination. Yes, there might be some ways to replace the firmware and stop it from doing that, but it's just not a sensible design overall.
If the Steam Deck didn't exist, then due to the recent support for Steam[], one of these would be my next choice for a portable Half Life 1/2 appliance.
Unless things have changed over the last few years, I think having 8/16 is a bit of an overkill for an OS this restricted. It says they all have 15W TDB but I'd hope that's just the just max they have been configured to work at. Hence me thinks even the 4/8 5425C should be plenty for web browsing and running android apps for many, many years.
Good hardware restricted by software reminded me once again of the thing that iPadOS is. Despite excellent processors, the software is essentially iOS, with all its restrictions. Though chrome os is Linux based at least.
Question for any curious or innovative HN readers - what would you suggest to do with iPadOS' restrictions? I'm speaking both as an ipad owner disappointed with the software but also as an M1/Ax chip fan.
Potential solutions I can easily think of are:
1. Jailbreak - but it needs specific software and can be finicky, and very likely forces you to not get security updates
2. Physically remove the storage and *do something*. Except I don't know what even is possible, assuming that you're okay performing BGA soldering on a $$$ device.
I have an 8 core CPU + 32GB RAM + 1TB Chromebook and it's my daily driver. I have ~100 tabs open, ~2 intellij projects open, some streaming service like youtube, netflix, hulu, etc. I run builds that pin the CPU such that if I had twice the cores I'd absolutely notice it.
I'd be very happy to see 16 core Chromebooks tbh, I definitely make heavy use of all 8 of mine today.
What's changed is that web pages, whether you like it or not, are full blown applications, written in JavaScript, so an OS restricted to browsing web pages still has has performance needs especially at the top end of the market.
Yes, people still underestimate the value of single core perf and overestimate the value over multi core perf.
In practise: what matters to users of these devices is web browsing performance (which is still mostly a single core job - perhaps a second core can be practical in some browser/OS combos).
Microsoft only taxes laptops sold by physical retail outlets. When ordering them online, one can often find a laptop without any OS preinstalled. Vendors are usually selling them to corporations who want Win10 enterprise covered by their volume licensing contracts.
Another good thing about them, it’s very uncommon for enterprise-targeted models to have soldered RAM or SSD. For instance, my secondary computer is HP ProBook 445 G8 with Ryzen 5 5600U which I upgraded to 32GB RAM / 2TB SSD, can recommend. However, I have no idea about ChromeOS compatibility, I’m using Windows and ordered a version with the OS license included.
There is no Microsoft tax for all intents and purposes. Manufacturers make more than an enough on the pre-installed crapware to make up for the Windows license.
Pixelbook is 4k. Seems like google discontinued the line but I use my 5 year old machine every day and it’s amazing. Boots in 1 second. Meanwhile my windows laptop is unusable.
I think this is good news, even though I bought a Chromebook last year and expect to use it for at least 5 years before replacing it. Linux containers are a very nice feature for development and having more CPU cores and general power is a great thing.
My Chromebook, at $300 is a great deal, compared to my new large iPad Pro (just the magic keyboard is $350, pencil is extra - both included on the Chromebook).
I'd be more interested in turning a Chromebook into a vanilla linux box if they moved away from soldered RAM (which is all I saw in Chromebooks a few years ago).
Sadly dram memory latency has stayed pretty constant over the last decade. As the cores per memory channel keeps increasing, does make one wonder when more memory channels will be added.
Already happened a few months ago. DDR5 doubled the number of memory channels in a normal desktop from 2 to 4. That’s 2 channels per DIMM.
Of course DDR4 still has lower latency today, but that should change next year.
Today the only way to reduce latency is to overclock your RAM. It’s pretty easy to get a $200 DDR4 kit to perform better than what you’d find in $5000 prebuilt PCs.
Seriously. A Pentium IV was 40M transistors. A Ryzen V 2000 has around 5 billion transistors. It could fit 100 Pentium IV cores if desired.
That's not desired -- those transistors are better spent bumping up IPC a little bit -- but we can have a perfectly adequate processor at 1% of a modern CPU.
Pentium IV single-core performance is almost identical to a modern entry-level netbook processor:
Memory throughput keeps increasing. While the number of channels per core doesn't increase, the clock rate keeps increasing, and when it stops increasing then bus width typically increases.
Did adding more channels start improving performance in a significant way sometime in the past decade?
Last time I checked, single vs dual channel was like a 5-10% performance difference, mostly useful for integrated graphics (and even then latency was the bigger problem)...
Modern Chromebooks do a lot more than just run a single website or a single web app - for example right now I am replying to you in Chrome browser but I also have a docker container running doing some dev work in the debian linux console on a separate workspace.
I have been looking for a Chromebook/Linux small laptop and all the small laptops available in Japan kinda suck for various reasons.
I wish Apple would bring back the 12 inch MacBook with the new M1 chip. Atom chip and butterfly keyboard was horrible at the time but now it would be a perfect ultralight laptop.
Up until recently I owned a Pixelbook, and the Linux layer (Crostini) made ChromeOS a very viable development platform. The one thing I missed was the ability to start virtual machines (and I believe this may have been addressed on newer ChromeOS hardware)
Really a lot. I recently installed CloudReady (equivalent of ChromeOS Flex) on a 8th Gen Dell latitude. From Gimp to running 3 different chrome browsers with different profiles. All just works.
Expired Chromebooks are cheap, and great for installing Linux.
For my purposes, a $100 used Chromebook is perfectly adequate, and is the sort of device I can take on a hike, kayak, or bike ride, and not worry if it's lost, stolen, or damaged.
One of the better (most ergonomic) laptops I've used was an Acer "WinBook", which was a fanless windows laptop (probably based on their chromebooks) that happened to be extremely Linux friendly.
Any idea if they're making similar non-chromebook versions of these?
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|3 years ago|reply
Once the bottom end baseline is finally moved up to quad or hex-core, there should be a stronger drive for software not aimed at users with heavier workloads to be multithreaded well.
[+] [-] magila|3 years ago|reply
Meanwhile that dual core Celeron is using Intel's performance cores which are much larger and several times faster than those ARM cores. Even for multithreaded workloads the Celeron will run circles around cheap quad core ARM SoCs.
[+] [-] sokoloff|3 years ago|reply
I don't want the lowest end offerings to become 15W TDP chips in $300 laptops. I think there's a perfectly valid place for 6W chips in $100 devices, which brings computing access to more people and places.
[+] [-] tyrfing|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1MachineElf|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/steam-on-chromeos/
[+] [-] oblak|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user_7832|3 years ago|reply
Question for any curious or innovative HN readers - what would you suggest to do with iPadOS' restrictions? I'm speaking both as an ipad owner disappointed with the software but also as an M1/Ax chip fan.
Potential solutions I can easily think of are: 1. Jailbreak - but it needs specific software and can be finicky, and very likely forces you to not get security updates
2. Physically remove the storage and *do something*. Except I don't know what even is possible, assuming that you're okay performing BGA soldering on a $$$ device.
[+] [-] moondev|3 years ago|reply
Restricted? It's capable of running:
* android apps directly from google play
* multiple linux containers (lxc)
* gpu accelerated linux gui apps (wyaland/lxc)
* docker containers inside lxc
* kvm virtual machines capable of linux, windows and even macOS guests
[+] [-] staticassertion|3 years ago|reply
I'd be very happy to see 16 core Chromebooks tbh, I definitely make heavy use of all 8 of mine today.
[+] [-] fragmede|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpmx|3 years ago|reply
In practise: what matters to users of these devices is web browsing performance (which is still mostly a single core job - perhaps a second core can be practical in some browser/OS combos).
[+] [-] izacus|3 years ago|reply
Also, remember, this "restricted" OS is more than capable of bringing up a full Debian container.
[+] [-] minorkey|3 years ago|reply
Do I have to buy an AMD Windows laptop, pay the Microsoft tax, and convert it to a Chromebook? (Assuming it's possible).
[+] [-] Const-me|3 years ago|reply
Another good thing about them, it’s very uncommon for enterprise-targeted models to have soldered RAM or SSD. For instance, my secondary computer is HP ProBook 445 G8 with Ryzen 5 5600U which I upgraded to 32GB RAM / 2TB SSD, can recommend. However, I have no idea about ChromeOS compatibility, I’m using Windows and ordered a version with the OS license included.
[+] [-] scarface74|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soared|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IE6|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|3 years ago|reply
My Chromebook, at $300 is a great deal, compared to my new large iPad Pro (just the magic keyboard is $350, pencil is extra - both included on the Chromebook).
[+] [-] nicklaf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ece|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliken|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NavinF|3 years ago|reply
Already happened a few months ago. DDR5 doubled the number of memory channels in a normal desktop from 2 to 4. That’s 2 channels per DIMM.
Of course DDR4 still has lower latency today, but that should change next year.
Today the only way to reduce latency is to overclock your RAM. It’s pretty easy to get a $200 DDR4 kit to perform better than what you’d find in $5000 prebuilt PCs.
[+] [-] blip54321|3 years ago|reply
Interconnect is expensive.
Seriously. A Pentium IV was 40M transistors. A Ryzen V 2000 has around 5 billion transistors. It could fit 100 Pentium IV cores if desired.
That's not desired -- those transistors are better spent bumping up IPC a little bit -- but we can have a perfectly adequate processor at 1% of a modern CPU.
Pentium IV single-core performance is almost identical to a modern entry-level netbook processor:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-4-300GHz...
[+] [-] sudosysgen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jotm|3 years ago|reply
Last time I checked, single vs dual channel was like a 5-10% performance difference, mostly useful for integrated graphics (and even then latency was the bigger problem)...
[+] [-] admax88qqq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dest|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IE6|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creakingstairs|3 years ago|reply
I wish Apple would bring back the 12 inch MacBook with the new M1 chip. Atom chip and butterfly keyboard was horrible at the time but now it would be a perfect ultralight laptop.
[+] [-] lupire|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ch_123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidmitchell2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blip54321|3 years ago|reply
For my purposes, a $100 used Chromebook is perfectly adequate, and is the sort of device I can take on a hike, kayak, or bike ride, and not worry if it's lost, stolen, or damaged.
[+] [-] hedora|3 years ago|reply
Any idea if they're making similar non-chromebook versions of these?
[+] [-] KSPAtlas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hankman86|3 years ago|reply