Anand's Thoughts on Google's Chrome OS
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 8, 2010 6:23 PM ESTPerformance
Atom is fast enough to run a Chrome browser and without the burden of Windows 7 I’d expect Chrome notebooks to be fast enough for most things. It remains to be seen how smooth things like scrolling Flash video playback will be however.
Google did provide two measures of performance in its announcement yesterday. Chrome OS should boot in around 10 seconds and wake from sleep instantly. These two imply that there’s some element of solid state storage at play within the Cr-48 but I’m still awaiting confirmation from Google. Edit: Storage on the Cr-48 is confirmed to be all solid state, no platters, thanks everyone!
ISA Independence
Chrome OS is currently only supported by Intel x86 platforms and will launch with Atom based designs, however with the apps running on Chrome OS being web based, from a developer standpoint the Chrome OS is effectively ISA independent.
If Google (or someone else, the OS being open source) chooses to port Chrome OS to ARM, so long as the underlying OS is full featured, apps that run on an x86 version would run on an ARM version. This leaves a huge opportunity for ARM to enter the notebook/netbook market with the Cortex A15 in the coming years. The OEMs would have to demand it however, and I suspect we will only see that if Intel drops the ball on being price/performance competitive in this space.
Whereas an ARM (or non-x86) threat to Intel never really existed in the Windows world, it’s very possible with Chrome OS.
I will add that while Chrome OS could enable ARM based notebooks, I don’t suspect that will happen in a major way anytime soon given what I know of Intel and ARM’s respective processor roadmaps.
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Tleilaxu Ghola - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
:-DOut of the thousands of posts I have mulled through today throughout the internet, this post takes over the top spot as my post of the month. This thread makes me lol, literally.
mrBug - Sunday, December 12, 2010 - link
Hehe obviously the stable version will be Cr-52 :-Dseapeople - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
12 inches? Come on, that's way too big. This thing is basically junk until they come out with a 7" version. Who wants to lug around a giant 12" computer all day? A significant portion of the population has bone cancer, some of them children. Why won't someone PLEASE think of the children!Griswold - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
Indeed. Unfortunately, Acer and Samsung will be doing their usual thing and sell us these cheap-ass looking, glossy toys instead.efeman - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
http://www.google.com/chromeos/pilot-program-cr48....Anand, regarding the drive: the line "What did we leave out? Spinning disks, ..." in the above link implies an SSD.
kepstin - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
I've heard from someone I know at Google that not only does the pilot laptop use solid state storage, but all notebooks sold that want to use the Google Chrome branding will be required to have solid state, in order to meet the boot time targets. No idea if this will actually hold true, when the manufacturers want to start cutting costs...Taft12 - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
An OEM laptop HD bottoms out at about $40 at retail (lower for large PC hardware players). I'm not sure an 8GB SSD with terrible performance like the one in my Dell Mini 9 would be any more and might even be less. I like the direction this is pushing the market!Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
Fixed! Thanks :)Roland00Address - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
Why would this computer be more advantageous than any other netbook and a simple dual boot (7 Starter and Chrome)?Taft12 - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
Your dollars that would go towards the Microsoft tax instead go towards a modem and data transfer. This is the easiest decision I've ever had to make.