5 ms·

I think Chromebooks did ARM years before Apple, no?

by axaxs 6y ago

jeffbee 6y ago
Yes but they were terrible. Just being ARM isn't some kind of magic dust. It has to actually be fast.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  How are Exynos chromebooks terrible?
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    They're slow. The only thing a Chromebook has is a web browser. The browser performance of e.g. the Samsung Chromebook 2 was less than half that of its contemporary competitors, and a modern Chromebook with an Intel Core CPU is 5-10x faster. Exynos didn't even manage to be the fastest ARM CPU in a Chromebook. The Tegra K1 was a bit quicker.
    - sangnoir 6y ago
      > The only thing a Chromebook has is a web browser My (Celeron) Chromebook 2 supported a whole Linux VM (via Crostini) and using Vim for python and Go development on it was noticeably slower than any contemporary laptop - I can't imagine the Exynos version was far off on perf (since it was only a diff SKU). I would not call it "terrible".
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        The Celeron Chromebooks 2 were only slightly faster, maybe 15%. That's why I specifically called out the Intel Core CPU, not the Celeron. The Celeron N2840 is a "Bay Trail" Atom core, which nobody would willingly purchase. The state of the art CPU from that generation of Chromebooks was the 4th gen Core i3, a "Haswell" part that was more than twice as quick as that Celeron.
- axaxs 6y ago
  I never had an ARM one, but imagine they would be a bit slow. However, they are still a fairly wide use case on a laptop, so to speak. And that gets blurred further by tablets I guess. The M1 is a nice product. But let's not pretend it's the first ARM device in the world. It has plenty of merits to rest on that it don't need that qualifier as justification, anyways.
- emn13 6y ago
  If you look at the historical benchmarks of the non-apple ARM chips, though they're clearly behind apple, they have largely kept pace. Huawei was perhaps even closing the gap before the trade war knocked them out of contention. I don't think apple was really all that special in this regard. They were ahead of the curve, which is impressive, but the market was created by arm, not just apple. I doubt we'd be seeing this kind of resurgence had others - especially google - not also jumped on the ARM bandwagon. A rising tide lifts all boats; both android and ios likely benefited from each others shared usage of arm because it helped the whole ecosystem. For some sense of scale: qualcomm's latest chip just released some benchmark numbers, and while they're not all that impressive (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16325/qualcomm-discloses-snapdragon-888-benchmarks https://www.anandtech.com/show/16325/qualcomm-discloses-snap...) it's still good to put "not that impressive" in perspective: they're comparable to i7-6700k in single-threaded workloads, and to an i7-4770k in multi-threaded workloads. The oldest iPhone that runs the same geekbench version I can find is the iPhone 5s, which is a little more than 4x slower in the single-threaded benchmark, and 8x in the multi-threaded. Yet that chip was no slouch! Obviously, apple's impressive pole position completely hogs the spotlight, but it's worth remembering that the competition isn't actually all that bad. That level of performance would make for an extremely fast chromebook - were it not for the fact that most are cheap cheap cheap and will never use a high-end chip. Development across the board has been so fast, that if you remember slow ARM chromebooks, I think you attribute that slowness to 2 things other than apple vs everybody else: firstly, they were built to a bargin-basement price, and thus you weren't getting anything near this performance not because it wasn't apple, but simply because they didn't use the right chips in the first place, and secondly, it's been a while, and when things improve that quickly, then a slightly outdated model can easily appear terrible without that being a condemnation of the whole approach.
  - GeekyBear 6y ago
    > If you look at the historical benchmarks of the non-apple ARM chips, though they're clearly behind apple, they have largely kept pace. Not really. Look at the difference between Apple's "little" cores and the stock ARM "little" core. >The performance showcased here roughly matches a 2.2GHz Cortex-A76 which is essentially 4x faster than the performance of any other mobile SoC today which relies on Cortex-A55 cores, all while using roughly the same amount of system power and having 3x the power efficiency. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2 Apple's Icestorm "little" cores are in the same performance ballpark as the big cores in the Qualcomm variant of a Galaxy S10. That's a night and day difference.
cogman10 6y ago
Has anyone seriously used chromebooks for development work? That's the difference.
- axaxs 6y ago
  I did for about a year, though with Linux installed instead. It's not really a bad experience when most if not all of your pipeline is punted remotely anyhow.
kccqzy 6y ago
Apple is not known to do things first, but do things better than the competitive in some way.

I think Chromebooks did ARM years before Apple, no?

by axaxs 6y ago

I think Chromebooks did ARM years before Apple, no?

jeffbee 6y ago

Yes but they were terrible. Just being ARM isn't some kind of magic dust. It has to actually be fast.

sangnoir 6y ago
How are Exynos chromebooks terrible?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  They're slow. The only thing a Chromebook has is a web browser. The browser performance of e.g. the Samsung Chromebook 2 was less than half that of its contemporary competitors, and a modern Chromebook with an Intel Core CPU is 5-10x faster. Exynos didn't even manage to be the fastest ARM CPU in a Chromebook. The Tegra K1 was a bit quicker.
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    > The only thing a Chromebook has is a web browser My (Celeron) Chromebook 2 supported a whole Linux VM (via Crostini) and using Vim for python and Go development on it was noticeably slower than any contemporary laptop - I can't imagine the Exynos version was far off on perf (since it was only a diff SKU). I would not call it "terrible".
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      The Celeron Chromebooks 2 were only slightly faster, maybe 15%. That's why I specifically called out the Intel Core CPU, not the Celeron. The Celeron N2840 is a "Bay Trail" Atom core, which nobody would willingly purchase. The state of the art CPU from that generation of Chromebooks was the 4th gen Core i3, a "Haswell" part that was more than twice as quick as that Celeron.
axaxs 6y ago
I never had an ARM one, but imagine they would be a bit slow. However, they are still a fairly wide use case on a laptop, so to speak. And that gets blurred further by tablets I guess. The M1 is a nice product. But let's not pretend it's the first ARM device in the world. It has plenty of merits to rest on that it don't need that qualifier as justification, anyways.
emn13 6y ago
If you look at the historical benchmarks of the non-apple ARM chips, though they're clearly behind apple, they have largely kept pace. Huawei was perhaps even closing the gap before the trade war knocked them out of contention. I don't think apple was really all that special in this regard. They were ahead of the curve, which is impressive, but the market was created by arm, not just apple. I doubt we'd be seeing this kind of resurgence had others - especially google - not also jumped on the ARM bandwagon. A rising tide lifts all boats; both android and ios likely benefited from each others shared usage of arm because it helped the whole ecosystem. For some sense of scale: qualcomm's latest chip just released some benchmark numbers, and while they're not all that impressive (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16325/qualcomm-discloses-snapdragon-888-benchmarks https://www.anandtech.com/show/16325/qualcomm-discloses-snap...) it's still good to put "not that impressive" in perspective: they're comparable to i7-6700k in single-threaded workloads, and to an i7-4770k in multi-threaded workloads. The oldest iPhone that runs the same geekbench version I can find is the iPhone 5s, which is a little more than 4x slower in the single-threaded benchmark, and 8x in the multi-threaded. Yet that chip was no slouch! Obviously, apple's impressive pole position completely hogs the spotlight, but it's worth remembering that the competition isn't actually all that bad. That level of performance would make for an extremely fast chromebook - were it not for the fact that most are cheap cheap cheap and will never use a high-end chip. Development across the board has been so fast, that if you remember slow ARM chromebooks, I think you attribute that slowness to 2 things other than apple vs everybody else: firstly, they were built to a bargin-basement price, and thus you weren't getting anything near this performance not because it wasn't apple, but simply because they didn't use the right chips in the first place, and secondly, it's been a while, and when things improve that quickly, then a slightly outdated model can easily appear terrible without that being a condemnation of the whole approach.
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  > If you look at the historical benchmarks of the non-apple ARM chips, though they're clearly behind apple, they have largely kept pace. Not really. Look at the difference between Apple's "little" cores and the stock ARM "little" core. >The performance showcased here roughly matches a 2.2GHz Cortex-A76 which is essentially 4x faster than the performance of any other mobile SoC today which relies on Cortex-A55 cores, all while using roughly the same amount of system power and having 3x the power efficiency. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16192/the-iphone-12-review/2 Apple's Icestorm "little" cores are in the same performance ballpark as the big cores in the Qualcomm variant of a Galaxy S10. That's a night and day difference.

cogman10 6y ago

Has anyone seriously used chromebooks for development work? That's the difference.

axaxs 6y ago
I did for about a year, though with Linux installed instead. It's not really a bad experience when most if not all of your pipeline is punted remotely anyhow.

kccqzy 6y ago

Apple is not known to do things first, but do things better than the competitive in some way.