Acer C720 Chromebook Delivers Fast Ubuntu Performance

Many benchmarks of the Acer C720 in different Linux environments and configurations will be forthcoming on Phoronix in the days and weeks ahead. This dual-core Celeron "Haswell" laptop is a surprisingly decent performer for just costing $200 USD.

For this article the performance of the Acer C720 was compared to six different laptops: HP EliteBook 161C (Core i5 2520M Sandy Bridge), ASUS S56C Ultrabook (Core i3 3217U Ivy Bridge), Apple MacBook Pro (Core i5 520M Arrandale), Lenovo ThinkPad W510 (Core i7 720QM Clarksfield), Lenovo ThinkPad T61 (Core 2 Duo T9300 Penryn), and a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 (Core Duo T2400 Yonah). It's a diverse selection of hardware spanning several generations of Intel processors and also a wide spectrum of mobile GPUs.

Fresh testing of the Samsung A15 Chromebook was left out due to its lack of accelerated Linux graphics drivers.

All seven systems were running clean installations of Ubuntu 13.10 with the Linux 3.11 kernel. Benchmarks from other kernel versions and newer Git graphics driver packages and other environments on the Acer C720 will be found in other Phoronix articles.

All of this benchmarking was streamlined via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software to carry out the tests in a fully automated and reproducible manner. You can see how your own Linux system(s) run side-by-side with these results by simply running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1312061-SO-CHROMEBOO30 to install all the same tests (and matching versions), configure the same, and then execute them with the same test parameters, followed by rendering all of the data side-by-side.