ARM / CE vs. Celeron / XP

I've been looking for awhile now at the low budget 7" CE netbooks... from Coby's $85 vaporware to the array of similar machines from Shenzhen, the best of the bunch seeming to be a 533mhz ARM processor, 128MB RAM, 2GB storage with CE6, for $146.

However, for about half again as much oney ($219) I can get an 8.9" Asus eepc with an 800mhz Celeron, 512MB RAM, 8GB storage, and XP Home. The Asus is about a half inch wider, an inch deeper, and half a pound heavier.

I understand fully the limitations of the CE platform (I have a Jornada 690 now), suffice to say it'll apparently do everything I need to do (reading ebooks, feeding music from an external drive to my stereo, internet on the road, and unloading digicam pictures to an SD card)... but obviously I can do more with XP.

What I'm not clear on, is what the performance difference (for similar operations) is between the ARM and the Celeron, taking into account the overhead of XP vs CE? Or how it would be if I put Linux on the ARM? Does the extra $73, half pound, and inch buy me anything useful?

Ahhh, the age old questions resurface....

"...what the performance difference (for similar operations) is between the ARM and the Celeron, taking into account the overhead of XP vs CE?..."

Comparing apples and oranges here...no way to really measure or compare differences between the cpus since the applications as designed are specific for each cpu. Generally speaking, an application that works well for CE has been optimized and isn't going to work any better for x86 devices. Nothing to be gained going either direction.

"...how it would be if I put Linux on the ARM?..."

Probably disappointing overall. Running linux on a CE device is really running it in a shell or in emulation mode. You lose some speed at the cost of being able to run a program that doesn't operate or have a counterpart in CE. Now I am no linux expert, and I know there are those who say it is the grace saving solution...but installing linux on an x86 machine is replacing the Windows completely. That is a far difference than running it on top of another operating system that is still active, or running it only in ram which is far slower. I guess I would run linux on my CE device if it had something I absolutely needed that wasn't available via any other method.

"...does the extra $73, half pound, and inch buy me anything useful..."

It buys you a machine that probably has far greater future potential in expandability, a much larger base of software solutions, something with greater resale value. But people buy these netbooks for a specific reason, realizing they are making a software and hardware sacrifice. They buy them because they are small and light and meet their basic needs...they don't need all the bells and whistles of a full-fledged XP system....and isn't that why we own HPCs to begin with?

Surely rich the comparissons anyone would like to see are :

Speed to turn on
Some browser speed tests on some common sites
Battery life (non-wi-fi and wi-fi)
Speed to connect to a wi-fi network (setting up from scratch)
And maybe some Video benchmarks to give at least an idea how it will handle video files.

I guess this sort of device will be used a fair bit for browsing so seeing if there is a speed tradeoff and how much the tradeoff is from the current CE devices, I think, is the most usefull.

John

I think the original asus 7" eee pc would be slightly better comparison, anyone have both a ce netbook and a 7" eee pc to compare?

I have seen those on eBay & other places refurbed for $150 and under.

The eee 7" version is pretty much same weight/size as the 8.9" version, so other than price/deals, you might as well go for the 8.9" (Make sure to research that battery drain on the 900 [and maybe 700] SD series; you lost ten percent daily unless you physically remove the battery; I've learned to live with this)

As far as installing Linux on a CE Arm netbook, that can't be done yet. At this point, you have to have a Linux machine. But RTFM has a new ARM machine and he's working on the transition, so fingers crossed... If he's successful, that will really open the possibilities.

Jake

Right... but it's still reasonable to compare results, e.g. browsing speed or boot time or editing a simple doc, each machine with their respective platform-specific applications.

Well, made my decision... a review of the Asus said it runs hot and the fan runs constantly... one of the things that annoy me about standard laptops. Accordingly, I ordered:
New 7" Netbook Notebook Mini Laptop 533mhz CE 6 WiFi



Interestingly, since I ordered the black one this afternoon, it's now sold out, and the white one is $4 more than it was at lunchtime.

None of the ones on ebay had both 533mhz (they're all 300), and they're all CE 5.0.

Will report when I get it.

Should have waited or looked harder. $89 with CE 6.0 and free shipping. 300mhz, but that's plenty for CE and better on battery life. My razorbook 400 is only 200mhz and the battery lasts 7-10 hours.

http://cgi.ebay.com/7-Mini-Laptop-Netbook-Computer-Notebook-WIFI-WindowsCE_W0QQitemZ220559715538QQcategoryZ177QQcmdZViewItemQQ_trksidZp4340.m8QQ_trkparmsZalgo%3DMW%26its%3DC%26itu%3DUCC%26otn%3D20%26ps%3D63%26clkid%3D8614319766864553503

Cheers

I saw those. I didn't feel that comfortable ordering from Hong Kong (probably silly, I know), but more importantly I thought the nearly double clock speed would be a good thing. We'll see.

RTFM--

How's it going with your new ARM machine? Any Linux-installation progress?

Jake

Just to clarify things here. Linux on ARM devices does not run over emulation layer. They run natively as WindowsCE does. The bootloader simply takes WinCE out of the RAM and starts to boot Linux as a normal computer should do. All the kernel/drivers are recompiled specifically for ARM, so there aren't any slowdown for the process. Linux doesn't run over WinCE, and that's why we loose all our WinCE data when we boot into linux.

Edited by ntware 2010-03-20 2:31 AM

Oh...well I was under a misconception then...that is good. So is the slower speed a result of running only in ram?

No. Linux doesn't run on RAM, it's too big for that. And also, if it was possible to run it completly on RAM, it would be really fast. RAM isthe fastest memory we have on computers today (except for L2 Cache memory, but that's something for another topic). It's a thousand times faster than the fastest hard drive ever made. Actually, linux runs on Compact Flash, that's kinda slow. But that's not the only reason. The biggest bottleneck to the hole system is the processor. The simple video card can helps to slowdown a little bit also. Run linux on a 200MHz or 300MHz processor can be a little frustrating. Also (correct me if I am wrong) I believe that the instruction set of the ARM processors are a little smaller than the x86 instruction set. This makes the ARMs processors to use more cycles to do stuff, and makes them slower.

ARM does utilize a RISC design, but that does not mean it requires more cycles to perform instructions because it is RISC. If anything, RISC processors provide higher performance than CISC processors (i.e. x86). However, in recent years the difference in performance between the two types has been reduced significantly. If you want a more in-depth and technical explanation, look at the wikipedia article here.

Edited by mscdex 2010-03-21 5:26 AM

Hello everybody,
Thank you "mscdex" for this very important information and link address of wikipedia which has great knowledge of technology about past, present and also about technology in future.