Samsung Chromebook (XE303) Review: Testing ARM's Cortex A15
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 31, 2012 9:00 AM ESTGoogle announced the Chrome OS project two years ago, and with it came the first Chromebook: the CR-48. The Chrome OS concept seemed revolutionary at the time. In 2010 we were well into the latest round of questioning whether today's PCs were fast enough. The Ultrabook revolution hadn't yet begun, and the iPad was starting to gain momentum. Capitalizing on the market being flooded with poor quality, yet affordable PC notebooks that still struggled with the same virus/malware issues they'd been facing for years, Google took the opportunity to attempt to revolutionize the PC OS.
The Chrome OS desktop
Chrome OS was that attempt at a revolution. As an OS built around a web browser, Chrome OS offered many of the advantages that the Chrome browser itself brought to the table: sandboxing, guest mode and constant/painless updates. All user data is encrypted on the drive by default. Security was and remains a major feature of Chrome OS.
Google's revolution extended to hardware as well. The Cr-48 notebook delivered a good keyboard, trackpad and solid state storage. Future Chromebooks would do the same. While the price points of these machines (<$500) kept ultra high resolution IPS displays out of the bill of materials, Google promised good build quality and solid state storage - two things you couldn't find in cheap notebooks of the time.
The new Samsung Chromebook
Since then, some of the traditional PC makers have woken up. Although confined to the $999+ price point, we're finally seeing attention paid to build quality, display quality and storage performance. Over the next couple of years there's going to be increased focus on bringing those premium features down to sub $700 price points.
For Chrome OS and Google's Chromebooks to remain relevant, they also had to move down the pricing stack. With its most recent announcement, Google has done just that. The new Chromebook (Samsung XE303C12) is priced at $249, while maintaining much of what made its predecessors interesting.
Even more interesting than its aggressive price point is the choice of SoC inside Google's new Chromebook: Samsung's Exynos 5 Dual, featuring two ARM Cortex A15 CPU cores. This move makes the new Chromebook the very first non-x86 machine to ship with Chrome OS. Given that I also happen to have a dual-core Atom based Chromebook from 2011, the new Exynos 5 based machine gave me a unique opportunity to get a preview of how ARM's next-generation CPU core would stack up against Atom.
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actionjksn - Thursday, November 8, 2012 - link
How would the performance on this compare to a similarly clocked Core 2 Duo? I'm talking about CPU tasks not graphics.TheJian - Monday, November 12, 2012 - link
You're forgetting to mention your basing that on a 1.3Ghz cpu from a year ago instead of the 1.7ghz tegra3+ that they're currently putting out (htc one x+ etc). That's about another ~27% you're leaving off NV's table right anand?So Intel's current tech is just about to catch NV's old tech with Tegra4 just around the block that will increase cpu (I don't expect much here, but they don't need much already quad and performs on par with what just came out to a large degree), and double gpu since going quad instead of dual, so at worst it will double if no chip improvement at all, and dual channel finally. Looks like they'll be behind again just after launch I guess? They'll have to do better than catching last years tech. And they didn't make it into xmas devices like Tegra. So again NV will get their tech out in time in Q1 for craploads of devices to be planned all year. I'm thinking it's best to be fastest in March/April if you want to be designed into Xmas devices.
Surface may have chosen the 1.3ghz but they should have ran a 1.7ghz Tegra3+. I guess it saved them $10/surface (less?). I'm sure customers would rather pay $5-10 for another 30% performance. They should at least offer the option. Oh well. I told my dad to buy a Nexus 10 for xmas anyway and I'll wait for a great 10in Tegra4 as if I'm going to game (dad isn't much) I want Tegra game optimizations and everything out now isn't quite as good as I'd like for Xbox360 portable replacement and double as a laptop i9300 replacement (it's 8yrs old...LOL). Nvidia seems to be the only one helping devs make some great stuff and gaining praise from the likes of Carmack and Epic's Unreal team.
Tegrazone.com has some great games in the pipe. I'm looking forward to Baldurs Gate enhanced on a 65in TV in the near future too...LOL. That game should run on anything out by everyone on the top end and give gamers a good 100+hrs of fun on the bigscreen without an xbox360/ps3. With my limited game time, it should hold me over until android gaming really takes off. There are 5 unreal 3 engine games in the pipe now, and lots of other good looking stuff at tegrazone says next xmas should be excellent. I'm sure Id's engine will get used by them in a few games also. Between these and my PC I should have no reason to even look at an xbox720/ps4. I'm guessing a lot will be in the same boat.
I may have to pony up for the cube u30gt jelly bean to get me to xmas which should produce a tegra4+. Then again going from 40nm to 20nm there may be no need. That's a HUGE decrease in chip size and samsung is better than TSMC at any process. The U30GT (and it's ilk) look pretty dang good for $200 tablet at 10in for something to use for training vids/books etc until next year.
sathish2020 - Wednesday, November 21, 2012 - link
"With Apple pushing at the top and Google working the bottom" Nice one.deslock - Thursday, November 29, 2012 - link
Thanks for the detailed (as usual) review. A question:Since it idles at 6.33W and has a 30 Watt-hour battery, shouldn't it last less than 5 hours with the screen on? It lasted 6.07 hours in the browsing test.
ramonchis - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - link
Hi. I got one of these a couple of days ago. In the first day I broke the LCD by putting some weight on the laptop.I went to the store (Best Buy) to check if they could repair it of exchange it, but they did not offer any solutions.
So.... I would like to change the screen myself, which I have done in the past with other laptops.
Did you get a chance to open the screen lid? Do you know the LCD model?
Thanks!
calden - Sunday, January 27, 2013 - link
I have used the Chromebook Since the CR-48 then moved to the Acer and now this one. You will be surprised as to how useful the apps found in the Google store really are. I use Microsofts 365 and I am just as productive as if I was using the full program on a normal laptop. I recently found a new online service called Lime Documents, fantastic. The writing program is called Lime Writer and after using it I can honestly say I will never have any use for none web apps again. www.live-documents.com/live_writer.html The same goes for the Excel and Powerpoint clone, there awesome apps.I love having the security the Chromebooks give me, I travel a lot and have either have had my laptop stolen or lost after a night of drinking. These give me the freedom of just shrugging my shoulders and saying oops instead of freaking out that someone now has photos of me and my dog with peanut butter. That was a joke of course it was the cat, at 250 dollars though these really are disposable computers.
My company recently bought over 300 Chromeboxes and Chromebooks. Our company is an all Unix environment with 90 percent of our data and internal apps being served from Oracle, in which all info is displayed with web apps. The few people who need Office or other software like the treasury department can display them using Citrix. A feature that was left out of the article, I for one use a CRM program called Goldmine. When I travel the 4G connection I have is more then fast enough to display this program and others. The Chromeboxes make a perfect dumb terminal, their also priced much better then the HP solution we were using. Google also doesn't mess about, we have many spares to switch out the defective ones if nessecsary. We then send them back to Google who just gives us new ones.
To tell you how useful a web program can be our software development team uses online development apps that were found in the Google store. They claim it's as good as if they were using Eclipse or Netbeans. I was actually amazed when they showed me. It's also a good employee incentive to give out a laptop to everyone even the secretaries. Yes they are just Chromebooks but our staff really seems to enjoy them as they can't muck'em up like they can with ordinary machines. We supply our people with Samsung 550's, the ARM version was deemed to slow but I took ome of the evaluation machines for my self as I like the size. I find it to be quick enough for my needs, I can stream 1080p movies from my Google Drive account without breaking a sweat so it's just fine for my needs.
qwerty321 - Wednesday, March 20, 2013 - link
One of the guys working at Linaro claims he has the USB 3.0 port pushing 70+ MB/s. I'm guessing an engineer knows better than a laypress hack.EvilTed - Saturday, September 7, 2013 - link
He should enlighten everyone how?I call BS on your enlightened engineers claims!
I'm fuming mad at Samsung for blatant false advertising.
I have tried ChromeOS as well as Ubuntu with Unity and XFCE and the average throughput over USB 3.0 is 16MB/s, which is slower than my 2011 Mackbook Pro over USB 2.0 :(
I actually bought my Chromebook for image transfer and storage from SD card to USB 3 drive.
The fact it cannot produce at all has left me with a $250 doorstop.
Class action suit anyone?
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