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Also worth noting is the Novena, which has similar goals: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena
by conradev 11y ago
Also worth noting is the Novena, which has similar goals: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena
- satai 11y agoNovena contains 4x Cortex A9 CPU, thet is much less power and not enough power for more serious work :(
- random778 11y agoI would argue that it's really powerful for certain, niche applications. Having an FPGA onboard is awesome. Now if we can get software everyone uses (office apps, browsers, and the big ones, not specialized ones 1% of people use) maybe the Novena will be fine. We should get that anyway so mid/low-range smartphones can replace the PC for most people.
- satai 11y agoYou are right, it has it's own (sadly small) niche. But it's hardly comparable to Librem.
- david-given 11y agoI just benchmarked my shiny new Asus Chromebook Flip (4-core ARM) against my ludicrously overpowered desktop (12-core Xeon E5-1650). I ran povray --benchmark, so it was a float-heavy number-crunching exercise. The figures were about 1500 CPU-seconds for the desktop and 3000 CPU-seconds for the Chromebook. Of course, wall-clock time was significantly less for the desktop due to having many more cores, but that's showing that per-core, the high-end Intel was only about twice as fast as the ARM. I do development work on the Chromebook, via a Debian chroot inside Crouton. And you know what? It's fine. It's probably the fastest laptop I've ever owned. The filesystem's a little slow, but compilation speeds are perfectly adequate.
- ggreer 11y agoI don't think your numbers are correct. My Core i7-4770K (4 cores) runs povray --benchmark faster than your 12 core Xeon: Render Time: Photon Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 1 seconds (1.256 seconds) using 11 thread(s) with 1.456 CPU-seconds total Radiosity Time: No radiosity Trace Time: 0 hours 2 minutes 18 seconds (138.426 seconds) using 8 thread(s) with 1099.214 CPU-seconds total That's POV-Ray 3.7 with no architectural optimizations. I just apt-get installed it. I would be very surprised if the Chromebook's 1.8GHz Cortex-A17 was only 3x slower. Googling around, I see people mentioning numbers like 10,000 CPU-seconds.
- david-given 11y agoI just reran it. I don't have access to the 12x Xeon now, but: 8x i7-3770K: 1123 cpu-seconds (wall-clock: 144 seconds) 4x Cortex A17: 3196 cpu-seconds (wall-clock: 963 seconds) I just wish it had more cores, but I suspect that Rockchip are raking in money from these things, and I expect we'll get more cores next year. The 12x Xeon was my work machine. I might have to have a word with them about it.
- satai 11y agoThe issue is Cortex A9 not ARM. Flip has Cortex A12 or Cortex A17.
- satai 11y ago(I am not ARM hater, the oposite is true. I admire the work Apple did when designing A9 -not the Cortex one - and I hope I can buy a lightweight laptop with Cortex A72 or Cryo next year. But this doesn't make Novena effort any way usable for heavy web usage or more demanding tasks or comparable with i5 notebooks for work..)
- keenerd 11y ago> via a Debian chroot inside Crouton Try a native install on the Flip, it is nice: http://kmkeen.com/c100p-tweaks/ http://kmkeen.com/c100p-tweaks/
- tinco 11y agoAre you seriously saying a machine that can process over a billion instructions per second, four times in parallel is not powerful enough for serious work? What kind of serious work do you do?
- satai 11y agoIt includes several open firefox tabs and running an IDE and a compiler. Anyway Cortex A9 is barely enough for web surfing if you visit some more demanding pages.
- davexunit 11y agoWe use Novenas as build slaves in GNU Guix's build farm and they work well. Is that not serious work?