Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

Google recently launched the Samsung Chromebook that for $249 USD features an 11-inch display, a 16GB SSD, a promise of 6.5-hour battery life, and is backed by a Samsung Exynos 5 SoC. The Samsung Exynos 5 packs a 1.7GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor with ARM Mali-T604 graphics. With using this new ARM Cortex-A15 chip plus the Samsung Chromebook not being locked down so it can be loaded up with a Linux distribution like Ubuntu or openSUSE, it was a must-buy for carrying out some interesting Cortex-A15 Linux benchmarks. The Exynos 5 Dual in this affordable laptop packs an impressive performance punch.

I'm still in the process of setting up Ubuntu on the Samsung Chromebook for delivering Linux ARM Cortex A15 performance benchmarks, but already someone beat me to using the Phoronix Test Suite for carrying out benchmarks of the ARM A15. The results were shared via OpenBenchmarking.org.

These results are quite interesting as the independent user benchmarking the Samsung Chromebook compared it to the result file used for the previous tests of the Calxeda quad-core 1.1GHz and 1.4GHz Highbank server nodes, a TI OMAP4460 dual-core 1.2GHz PandaBoard ES, and an Intel Atom D525 x86_64 CPU running at 1.8GHz. The Chromebook was loaded with an early development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04 with a Linux 3.4 kernel for Exynos 5 SoC.

ARM advertises the Cortex-A15 as being 40% faster than the Cortex-A9 when having the same clock speed and core count. The A15 also supports 40-bit LPAE for handling up to 1 Terabyte of RAM and also supports Xen / KVM hardware virtualization. One of the first A15-based SoCs was the Samsung Exynos 5 dual while the NVIDIA Tegra 4 and Texas Instruments OMAP5 are other forthcoming SoCs running on the A9 successor.

Here are the independent Samsung Exynos 5 Dual Chromebook benchmarks with Ubuntu while my own results that contain more extensive data along with power consumption metrics and more are forthcoming.