Chromebook + Haswell = Acer C720

Devices with installed Chrome OS (as well as any other Web OS that exist in nature) were met by the world community with dual feelings. On the one hand, it turned out curious, on the other - why is it necessary and how to use it? Vendors, in turn, did not bother with worldview questions and, while designing a new class of devices, went along the beaten track: they equipped the Chromebooks with a typical mobile filling based on ARM or Intel Atom. Is it possible to make them work faster? To study this topic, as well as the first acquaintance with the still somewhat exotic category of notebooks, we took advantage of Acer's kind offer and tested the Acer C720 chromebook based on the Haswell processor.

To begin with, some personal impressions of a two-week communication with the Acer C720. The device looks strictly and concisely, in some tests its appearance is called rustic, however, in my opinion, it is better than fussiness. Build quality at height, crevices and creaks were not found. The keyboard and touchpad also left a pleasant impression. As for the display, it seems to me that its quality is quite adequate to the positioning and cost of the device.


The appearance of Chrome OS is almost not customizable - at the disposal of vendors, except that the wallpaper on your desktop

Now about the functional features of the C720. Chrome OS on it really loads very quickly, within a few seconds (seven, to be more precise). The design of the OS is as concise as the type of laptop: a few shortcuts in the main menu (most of them are actually web pages), a minimum of settings, and even fewer options for customization. The question of whether it’s boring to work in Chrome OS will have to be set aside because of its multiplicity, but I can testify: when you do exactly that, you don’t notice the primitiveness of the OS, because it has the minimum subsistence level of settings and functions. Let's say I did not like the "lazy" mouse - there was a corresponding slider. But when you begin to poke back and forth out of boredom, it turns out that there’s no particular place to poke. Well, at least the Internet is big, look yes.
')

The screenshot is almost complete set of operating system settings. A little bit from the word "absolutely"

Two more points that I would like to mention. Firstly, the chromabook is very cold, even at full load, the temperature of the processor is a little more than human, and there is nothing to load this device in full. In a simple system, it generally has near ambient temperature. Secondly, we are not deceived about good autonomy. When performing a difficult task (playing two HD movies simultaneously with downloading them over the network), the C720 batteries lasted for 3.5 hours, and in the emulation mode of web browsing it lived for as long as 9 hours. The working day this device, perhaps, can spend without recharging ...

Very handles asked for something more, and I decided to install Linux on the Chromebook, especially since the way to do it is described and simple . Since there is no standard bootloader in Chromebooks, I had to restrict myself to Ubunta installed in chroot with all the advantages and disadvantages of this solution. The option specified in the post is actually 100% working, the installation is fully automatic (only at the end they are asked to enter the root password) and it takes along with all the downloading and unpacking of 10 minutes with fast internet. You can switch between systems with a minimum delay if someone suddenly misses Chrome OS.

Linux on the Chromebook was put for a reason, and to fulfill point 2 of the program: CPU performance testing. The browser tests were left for later (we will get to them too), and at first I drove a few classic well-known tests from the PPP set. The results were compared with the Samsung Chromebook chromebook based on the Samsung Exynos Dual processor.

	Exynos 5 (1.7 GHz, 2 cores)	Intel Celeron 2955U (1.4 GHz, 2 cores)	Growth
7-Zip compression	1951	3060	56%
Parallel BZIP2 Compression	88.41	46.09	91%
LAME MP3 Encoding	52.3	33.9	54%
X264	10.62	30.1	183%
C-ray	447.4	152.3	193%

It is easy to see that at a lower frequency in terms of mathematical abilities, Intel Haswell leaves Exynos far behind. Looking ahead, I’ll say that the latest eight-core Samsung Exynos Octa processor also looks pale in comparison with Haswell, on which one of the variants of the Samsung Chromebook 2 is based. Generally speaking, if we talk about all the Chromebook models currently sold in Russia Only 5 topical) in performance of the Acer C720 is second only to Google Chromebook Pixel based on Intel Core i5 (Ivy Bridge), and despite the difference in the class of processors, in some tests there are only a few - not to mention the fact that Pixel is more than 3 times more expensive than the C720.

Now it is time for javascript browser tests. In the latter, in addition, the performance of two- and three-dimensional web graphics is checked.

	Intel Celeron	Exynos dual	Exynos octa
SunSpider	348	668	619
Octane	10661	3465	5982
Browsermark 2.0	4618	2170	3320

The result is a bit predictable: Haswell convincingly dominates. Thus, in terms of performance / price ratio, the Acer C720 is currently unparalleled. There is no doubt that if the Chromebook category is recognized as viable, other manufacturers will also release models based on Intel Haswell processors as the most optimal in this case. But in the feasibility of the development of "premium Chromebooks" let me doubt - they do not tally with the essence of laptops with Web OS.