Acer C720 Chromebook Delivers Fast Ubuntu Performance

[curaga]

I have not seen any Kabanis yet, but where I live there are 11" Kavaris up for sale at reasonably low prices.

You sure? Kaveri is not shipping yet.

[Sonadow]

Yeah, sure, but it's $199. Of course to use it effectively within Linux you probably need to spend that $99 on a 128GB SSD.

Shame that there are no AMD Kabini versions, but maybe AMD needs to do a reference cheap Chromebook/Netbook design for OEMs to use (instead of the horrible cheap 15.6" Kabini laptops).

I have not seen any Kabanis yet, but where I live there are 11" Kavaris up for sale at reasonably low prices.

[sykobee]

Yeah, sure, but it's $199. Of course to use it effectively within Linux you probably need to spend that $99 on a 128GB SSD.

Shame that there are no AMD Kabini versions, but maybe AMD needs to do a reference cheap Chromebook/Netbook design for OEMs to use (instead of the horrible cheap 15.6" Kabini laptops).

[Sonadow]

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.

Ahh.

I see that I'm not the only one who experienced the undocumented cpu throttling 'feature' in the older Ma

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.

Apple still does this with the newer Macbooks and MacBook Pros? I'm surprised.

Anyway, it's not exactly a fixed factor of 2. I owned a while MacBook that was powered by Intel's Napa (refresh) platform (that's even before Santa Rosa!) and had a processor clocked at 1.83GHz. When the battery is removed and the notebook powered solely on AC, the frequency dropped to 1.0GHz.

[mczak]

Lol @ $200 chromebook beating $2000 macbook pro

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.

[mczak]

1.3kg device is too heavy if it has only 2 GB RAM and 16 GB SSD.
1.3kg device should have at least 4 GB RAM and 1 TB HDD or 120 GB SATA SSD replaceable with 1 TB HDD.

There's a 4GB version available (and I absolutely agree this is the version to get even if of course it's a bit more expensive).
NGFF SSD's are a bit difficult to get but apparently there is at least one 120GB option. Though of course with those 2 upgrades it will run closer to 350$ rather than 200$. But neither option makes it "more heavy".

[uid313]

It's a laptop not a gentleman sausage, as such I wouldn't class 11 inches and 1.3kg as big or heavy.

It's not a laptop, its a chromebook.
A laptop is a powerful general-purpose portable computer.

A chromebook is web appliance. A low-power, light, portable device with only a web browser.

[M1kkko]

I don't think a chromebook should have any mechanical hard disk drives.

What are you talking about? I'm one hoping that it actually would have some sort of a hard disk drive, which it obviously doesn't have, because it's a chromebook. :/

[JS987]

It's a laptop not a gentleman sausage, as such I wouldn't class 11 inches and 1.3kg as big or heavy.

1.3kg device is too heavy if it has only 2 GB RAM and 16 GB SSD.
1.3kg device should have at least 4 GB RAM and 1 TB HDD or 120 GB SATA SSD replaceable with 1 TB HDD.

[Herem]

This device is just big and heavy toy if doesn't have at least 4 GB RAM and 120 GB SATA SSD or 1 TB HDD.

It's a laptop not a gentleman sausage, as such I wouldn't class 11 inches and 1.3kg as big or heavy.