Acer C720 Chromebook Delivers Fast Ubuntu Performance

[carewolf]

The Macbook Pro numbers are very seriously off. There's no way a core i5 520m can't keep up with a C2D T9300 or even the old Core Duo in some cases. I think there's 2 possible explanations for this:
1) Missing reclocking support of the nvidia graphics chip causes lots of power draw, in turn causes cpu thermal throttling due to insufficient cooling. IIRC though most notebook graphics chips tend to use low clocks not high ones at bootup, so this seems unlikely.
2) The battery is dead (not just low capacity but the controller refuses to charge/use it). This will cause some very heavy (undocumented and hidden) cpu throttling on these MacBooks. The reason for that behavior is because the peak power draw of these notebooks is in fact higher than what the charger can provide it relies on the battery to be able to provide enough power for these peaks. And if the battery is dead it will use some well hidden throttling mechanism so it can never reach those peaks in the first place. Having experienced this just recently this is definitely no fun (though that was on a SNB MacBook Pro - it did get reduced to a constant 0.8Ghz frequency even though the cpu freq indicators were still saying 2.4Ghz+... - I think on pre-SNB MacBooks throttling mechanism is a bit different and more like a fixed factor of 2).
There might be other possiblities (like thermal throttling due to broken fan) but in any case something is definitely not right.

If it something that like happens with Macbook Pros, that means the Macbook Pro numbers are not off, but in fact more realistic than the number sof a complete new and unused MbP (and that Macbook Pros are just kind of crap).

[mczak]

If it something that like happens with Macbook Pros, that means the Macbook Pro numbers are not off, but in fact more realistic than the number sof a complete new and unused MbP (and that Macbook Pros are just kind of crap).

No that's not really true. Note that it doesn't matter at all if the battery only has half the capacity or something like that, as long as it isn't completely dead (that is, the notebook refuses to charge/discharge). Unless you'd expect dead batteries to be normal after a couple years, but I would expect most people exchanging them in this case still.
(Though it is true that if you have an average power draw higher than what the charger can deliver you will also see throttling presumably if the battery is still working, but I'm not sure how this would work exactly and I suspect it can only really happen with combined cpu+gpu load over a long time (2+ hours).
I won't disagree though this is kind of crappy behavior, the sole reason for this is to keep the charger a small little box - similar specced pc notebooks come with power adapters twice the output capability (if not more) and they are obviously larger (and more heavy).

[TheOnlyJoey]

This chromebook seems very interesting to me, but I can't seem to find any information at all about the GPU.

I know it's a Intel HD Graphics Honeywell IGP, but since there are quite a lot with different results, it is hard to see how it actually performs.
Normally I would check on videocardbenchmarks.net but its not on there.

Is there a other Videocard you can compare the results with so I can get a idea on the performance?

[beefycheesy]

Why not give crouton a thought?

I got my C720 in the mail at the beginning of the week. I had the back off and installed the MyDigitalSSD 64GB first thing. After trying a couple of distros, I gave crouton a try. Since it uses the underlying system as a base, I didn't have any of the issues I was having to work around on others (namely trackpad compatibility, cpupower/fan issues). I used Debian/Sid as my target, and then installed fluxbox from within the chroot as I am mostly interested in the command line tools available from a full distro.

I ran this against the benchmarks from Michael's article and uploaded them to here. I haven't been successful in getting the HPC challenge to run, but I feel pretty good about the results nonetheless.

What I found interesting is that the speeds between the two are mostly on track. The better graphics scores are due to the improvements in Mesa. Even with that, I was expecting less due to running off a chroot in VT2 and being limited to the kernel 3.8.11 that ships with Chrome OS.