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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 i

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.

sokoloff 4y ago
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.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  Do you run Linux? I think even web browsing on Windows with this is challenging
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    It's running ChromeOS with the Linux dev system installed. I did last year's Advent of Code in Clojure on this device, including some airplane trips. (I didn't solve every puzzle, but the limitation on the ones I didn't get was me, not the Chromebook. It runs Emacs, cider, and the Clojure REPL just fine.) I'm typing on it right now and it's fine for casual use. (It gets a fair amount of weekend use because I neither want to undock my work laptop nor carry around something that large, expensive, and heavy.) Would I run it as my only computer if $500 wouldn't pressure my family finances? Probably not. If my choice was between this and nothing, that's an even easier choice.
  - jewel 4y ago
    The bottleneck is usually RAM. It looks like his device has 4GB, which is similar to what a cell phone has. It doesn't take much manufacturer-supplied bloatware, bad drivers, or background processes to use up that much RAM but a Chromebook is just the kernel and Chrome, so you get a lot of bang for your buck.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      Similar to what a mid-range phone has :)
- jotm 4y ago
  For reference, it offers about half the performance of a Snapdragon 845... It's honestly a garbage chip for disposable devices, which is just bad for everything. I'd rather use one $300 device than 3x $100 devices over the same timespan.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Also for reference, it's about double the performance of a 3.7 GHz Pentium 4, which was a perfectly usable desktop CPU.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      Pentium 4 stopped being a benchmark for desktop usability a long time ago. Any JS website will bring it to its knees.
      - KronisLV 4y ago
        > Any JS website will bring it to its knees. Maybe that's a problem in of itself? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law There is nothing intrinsically different about computing from, say, 10 years ago. You might still want to read some text on a webpage, click on a few buttons and have them do something, maybe fill out some text fields, or even upload/download a few files. Instead, you get "visual experiences" with overcomplicated UIs with similarly overcomplicated underlying technologies (edit: not to say that there aren't benefits to technologies like Vue/Angular/React, however they aren't "necessary" to get things done most of the time, in many cases even server side rendering without JS would be enough), all of which waste all of the resources that you'll give them, especially if you don't have ad-blockers on which means that you'd get bogged down with dozens if not hundreds of malicious scripts. Of course, this is a bit akin to shouting at the cloud, but nobody should be too proud about the state the modern web is in and use it to justify wasteful hardware and software requirements: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
      - hedora 4y ago
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  There shouldn't need to be such a large tradeoff between efficiency and core count, and in the world of ARM CPUs it's not. It's entirely possible to pack 4+ reasonably performant cores into a 6W TDP, and likely at non-extravagant prices.
  - staticassertion 4y ago
    > and in the world of ARM CPUs it's not. How can this be true? I'm not saying it isn't, but this makes it sound like ARM is just objectively better - lower power and higher performance? I assume it's more complicated.
    - Veliladon 4y ago
      Most of the time you can increase performance either by increasing clock frequency or doing more per clock. Raising clock speed usually increases power exponentially. On a desktop this is usually the strategy because we can put decent cooling rigs on them. Doing more per clock is difficult on an x86 compared to ARM. x86's instruction set is a hodgepodge collection of instructions of variable lengths and addressing modes. ARM64 on the other hand has far less addressing modes and a fixed 32-bit instruction length. When an x86 is trying to decode ahead of the instruction stream it needs to decode each instruction in order or have special logic to get around that which makes it more difficult to stay ahead of the processor. Normally you see an x86 chip described as having a certain number of complex and a certain number simple decoders because some instructions are just pigs of things to decode. Simple decodes will get stuff that decode to 3 uops or less while complex handles most of the rest. Some real pigs of instructions might even be sent to the microcode sequencer which generates a whole heap of uops which takes a while. In the case of ARM64 every 4 bytes you have an instruction come hell or high water. On a chip like the M1 it takes 32-bytes of instructions, splits every 4 bytes between its 8 decoders, and each will spit out uops in parallel. From there the chip will issue those decoded instructions to the necessary execution ports. Because of the less complicated decoding, the huge increase in decoding throughput, and the huge reorder buffers an M1 can keep more of its execution ports busy. If twice as many execution ports can be kept full it means you can do the same amount of work in half as many clock cycles. Because you're only running at half the clock speed your power usage is way lower.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  15W TDP for 4x more performance means the processor can race to sleep faster, which means it may even have better battery life. The prices will eventually go down.
magila 4y ago
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.
- yywwbbn 4y ago
  Not sure if this is the case, Celerons are just plain bad… e.g. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_celeron_n4500-vs-qualcomm_snapdragon_860 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_celeron_n450... Single thread performed is kind of close, 860 is faster though. And let’s not even look at the MT benchmarks. And generally it seems that most medium/high end chromebooks with ARM cpus are generally able to outperform x86 ones.
  - my123 4y ago
    Snapdragon 7c Chromebooks do indeed outperform the Pentium-based machines… Says more about Intel’s Atom line than anything tbh.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    That’s because it’s an atom-type CPU core, and not a good one (the good ones are called “Atom”). A laptop with this CPU basically is using the “efficiency core” from a recent laptop but as its main core. There are plenty of Core-class x86 ChromeOS laptops and these smoke all ARM-based laptops excepting Apple’s.
  - magila 4y ago
    You're comparing an Atom based Celeron, which is the bottom of the barrel for Intel CPUs and not something which often shows up in Windows laptops, to a top-of-the-line Snapdragon SoC. The wholesale price of the 860 is probably 2-3x that of the N4500.
tyrfing 4y ago
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.
zozbot234 4y ago
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.

sokoloff 4y ago

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.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
Do you run Linux? I think even web browsing on Windows with this is challenging
- sokoloff 4y ago
  It's running ChromeOS with the Linux dev system installed. I did last year's Advent of Code in Clojure on this device, including some airplane trips. (I didn't solve every puzzle, but the limitation on the ones I didn't get was me, not the Chromebook. It runs Emacs, cider, and the Clojure REPL just fine.) I'm typing on it right now and it's fine for casual use. (It gets a fair amount of weekend use because I neither want to undock my work laptop nor carry around something that large, expensive, and heavy.) Would I run it as my only computer if $500 wouldn't pressure my family finances? Probably not. If my choice was between this and nothing, that's an even easier choice.
- jewel 4y ago
  The bottleneck is usually RAM. It looks like his device has 4GB, which is similar to what a cell phone has. It doesn't take much manufacturer-supplied bloatware, bad drivers, or background processes to use up that much RAM but a Chromebook is just the kernel and Chrome, so you get a lot of bang for your buck.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    Similar to what a mid-range phone has :)
jotm 4y ago
For reference, it offers about half the performance of a Snapdragon 845... It's honestly a garbage chip for disposable devices, which is just bad for everything. I'd rather use one $300 device than 3x $100 devices over the same timespan.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Also for reference, it's about double the performance of a 3.7 GHz Pentium 4, which was a perfectly usable desktop CPU.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    Pentium 4 stopped being a benchmark for desktop usability a long time ago. Any JS website will bring it to its knees.
    - KronisLV 4y ago
      > Any JS website will bring it to its knees. Maybe that's a problem in of itself? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law There is nothing intrinsically different about computing from, say, 10 years ago. You might still want to read some text on a webpage, click on a few buttons and have them do something, maybe fill out some text fields, or even upload/download a few files. Instead, you get "visual experiences" with overcomplicated UIs with similarly overcomplicated underlying technologies (edit: not to say that there aren't benefits to technologies like Vue/Angular/React, however they aren't "necessary" to get things done most of the time, in many cases even server side rendering without JS would be enough), all of which waste all of the resources that you'll give them, especially if you don't have ad-blockers on which means that you'd get bogged down with dozens if not hundreds of malicious scripts. Of course, this is a bit akin to shouting at the cloud, but nobody should be too proud about the state the modern web is in and use it to justify wasteful hardware and software requirements: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
    - hedora 4y ago
kitsunesoba 4y ago
There shouldn't need to be such a large tradeoff between efficiency and core count, and in the world of ARM CPUs it's not. It's entirely possible to pack 4+ reasonably performant cores into a 6W TDP, and likely at non-extravagant prices.
- staticassertion 4y ago
  > and in the world of ARM CPUs it's not. How can this be true? I'm not saying it isn't, but this makes it sound like ARM is just objectively better - lower power and higher performance? I assume it's more complicated.
  - Veliladon 4y ago
    Most of the time you can increase performance either by increasing clock frequency or doing more per clock. Raising clock speed usually increases power exponentially. On a desktop this is usually the strategy because we can put decent cooling rigs on them. Doing more per clock is difficult on an x86 compared to ARM. x86's instruction set is a hodgepodge collection of instructions of variable lengths and addressing modes. ARM64 on the other hand has far less addressing modes and a fixed 32-bit instruction length. When an x86 is trying to decode ahead of the instruction stream it needs to decode each instruction in order or have special logic to get around that which makes it more difficult to stay ahead of the processor. Normally you see an x86 chip described as having a certain number of complex and a certain number simple decoders because some instructions are just pigs of things to decode. Simple decodes will get stuff that decode to 3 uops or less while complex handles most of the rest. Some real pigs of instructions might even be sent to the microcode sequencer which generates a whole heap of uops which takes a while. In the case of ARM64 every 4 bytes you have an instruction come hell or high water. On a chip like the M1 it takes 32-bytes of instructions, splits every 4 bytes between its 8 decoders, and each will spit out uops in parallel. From there the chip will issue those decoded instructions to the necessary execution ports. Because of the less complicated decoding, the huge increase in decoding throughput, and the huge reorder buffers an M1 can keep more of its execution ports busy. If twice as many execution ports can be kept full it means you can do the same amount of work in half as many clock cycles. Because you're only running at half the clock speed your power usage is way lower.
sudosysgen 4y ago
15W TDP for 4x more performance means the processor can race to sleep faster, which means it may even have better battery life. The prices will eventually go down.

magila 4y ago

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.

yywwbbn 4y ago
Not sure if this is the case, Celerons are just plain bad… e.g. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_celeron_n4500-vs-qualcomm_snapdragon_860 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_celeron_n450... Single thread performed is kind of close, 860 is faster though. And let’s not even look at the MT benchmarks. And generally it seems that most medium/high end chromebooks with ARM cpus are generally able to outperform x86 ones.
- my123 4y ago
  Snapdragon 7c Chromebooks do indeed outperform the Pentium-based machines… Says more about Intel’s Atom line than anything tbh.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  That’s because it’s an atom-type CPU core, and not a good one (the good ones are called “Atom”). A laptop with this CPU basically is using the “efficiency core” from a recent laptop but as its main core. There are plenty of Core-class x86 ChromeOS laptops and these smoke all ARM-based laptops excepting Apple’s.
- magila 4y ago
  You're comparing an Atom based Celeron, which is the bottom of the barrel for Intel CPUs and not something which often shows up in Windows laptops, to a top-of-the-line Snapdragon SoC. The wholesale price of the 860 is probably 2-3x that of the N4500.

tyrfing 4y ago

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.

zozbot234 4y ago

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.