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.

e.g. 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.

The N4020 is the model of Celeron used in the 2021 Dell Chromebook. I'm seeing N3060, 2955U, etc.

The Pentium Silver N5000, which isn't badged as a Celeron, is still much slower on multi-threaded and single-threaded perf: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_pentium_silv...

The entire Snapdragon 865 package cost manufacturers $150-$160. The Pentium Silver N5000 retails for $90-100. The 860 would presumably be even cheaper than the 865.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Celeron-7300-Processor-B...

Is the latest celeron which should be more or less equal to a 6th gen i7 while using a lot less power. They are selling a 3 year old celeron in a 2021/2022 chromebook which is inexcusable.

Acer sells a chromebook with an i5 that's routinely $430 refurbished (yes it's a refurb but it's basically always available) https://acerrecertified.com/chromebooks/?_bc_fsnf=1&Processo...

Sign. I would be surprised if dell is buying the Pentium N5000 along with chipset for more than $60. And that is excluding marketing rebate.

Says more about Intel’s Atom line than anything tbh.

There are plenty of Core-class x86 ChromeOS laptops and these smoke all ARM-based laptops excepting Apple’s.

Currently rocking a Lenovo chromebook Flex 5i with an i3-1115G4 and it's outperforming my phone's Snapdragon 845 in rendering video animations by a reasonably well margin.

I actually misplaced the magsafe cable before I had to charge it the first time. The little cores make the right perf/watt tradeoff for all but the heaviest workloads, such as slack. Sometimes slack pops onto a performance core for a few seconds at a time.

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.

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.

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.

The prices will eventually go down.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe that's a problem in of itself?

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

Even "garbage" arm CPUs are fine these days. All my real work happens when I remote into a machine that's faster than a $3500 workstation laptop. The remaining heavy workload is the web browser (and, perhaps, corporate email client / other crapware)

I agree, but do consider how many Chromebooks are purchased by schools. The calculus there might be different, because kids drop things.

Note that ethically, I'm not convinced this need outweighs the environmental concerns.