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Comment by hyperpallium | Hacker News Reader

More specs at anandtech http://www.anandtech.com/show/9797/asus-launches-the-chromeb...

Its Mali T764 GPU seems more powerful than an xbox360: the T760 has 326 GFLOPS; xbox360 xenos GPU has about 240 GFLOPS. Not sure what difference the 4 in 764 makes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_(GPU) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenos_(graphics_chip)

These PC sticks have been around for years... I wonder if the killer app will be 4K streaming? 4K TV's look great, but no TV programming available; no media (4K blu-rays are not out yet); downloading 40GB takes too long; whereas streaming is popular.

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326 GFLOPS is with 16 GPU cores. Most likely it has 4 GPU cores which would be ~82 GFLOPS @ 600 MHz.

Yeah, I think so too. There's a list [0] over here with common mobile GPU specs which states the same (actually denotes T764 as an alternate name for T760 MP4). Not sure what his/her source is though so take it with a grain of salt.

[0] http://kyokojap.myweb.hinet.net/gpu_gflops/

There is Intel's Compute Stick too[1] but I haven't try it yet.

[1] http://www.intel.com/buy/us/en/product/desktop/intel-boxstck...

If it's x86/x86_64, it has a major advantage imho

Why wouldn't it be? It's certainly not Itanium-based…

It is, but it's also only got intel graphics. You won't be doing any 4k work on it. I have one and it's great for office work, but good luck getting a game to run even 1080p.

How do you use it? What's the advantage of having it?

Quad core Atom

They're already hugely popular in China where a lot of the use is streaming tv and movies, via both legal and illegal means (the boundaries blur a lot over there anyway). I bought an Android-based stick from Alibaba a few years ago that plugged into HDMI and worked fantastically. Computing power and abilities have come on tremendously since so I can imagine how well this would work for high quality video.

The portability of computing continues. Take anywhere, do anything.

Yet TVs still ship with crappy and slow interfaces for some reason.

They're getting better, but still a mixed bag. The menu interface on my new Vizio is perfectly fine, but the Netflix app is actually nicer than Apple TV. The Amazon app, however, is a UX nightmare, that looks like some kind of very old Android UI and it doesn't even work with the TV's keyboard remote.

I'd rather see less features, but more polished and faster interfaces. You'll be plugging your devices anyway.

It's like car stereos - just let me plug AUX cable and we are square for next 10 years.

The flatscreen producers would probably prefer you came back every 2 years to buy a new TV with updates to their OS, instead of just every 10 years.

Sure, but unless they stop supporting external hardware, nobody is going to. It's kind of like embedded GPS in cars; it's cool at first, but nobody actually pays Garmin and Tomtom the ridiculous fee for map updates, they just use the slightly crappier old ones.

I'm still hoping the smart TV thing will turn out to be a brief fad, and we can all get back to just buying a dumb screen that other things can be plugged into.

The software on TVs I've experienced is universally awful, my parent's one is particularly bad - you can go and make a cup of coffee in the time it takes for the Netflix app to start. When I heard that I bought them a FireTV stick and haven't looked back.

I'm surprised there isn't a Rockbox for TVs yet.

There are some projects making baby-steps but I'm not sure how far they got.

For Samsung TVs the SamyGO project can do some stuff - http://www.samygo.tv/ - but it's more about hacking the existing firmware than making an open replacement.

You hope? Why do you expect this to be a fad in the very end.

Oh I also think TV's should all be about we glamouring for the resolution. Seems 4K is here to win.

I hope the same.

TV, as pretty much every device, should be as dumb as cables .. must be reliable and work with pretty much anything that it's plugged to, no matter what that is

Stupid licensing will prevent this, I'm afraid.

I have a nVidia Shield TV plugged in to my 4K Smart TV that I do almost everything on, but I still have to use the smart TV app for Amazon Instant since Amazon stubbornly refuses to release it for stock Android.

In an upturn, everyone is collaborative. In a downturn, everyone builds silos...

You could by a little case to hold your Shield, Chromecast, Alexaplug, Applecore, etc, that connect to your TV.

> downloading 40GB takes too long; whereas streaming is popular

Um, what? If you can stream 4K media in real time, by definition you are able to download the file in at least the media's run time.

That is: you're only spending ≤30 minutes to download a 4K TV show episode if you can also stream it.

Pretty sure that's what he or she meant by "too long." Not many people want to wait 30 minutes to watch something for 30 minutes.

For anyone currently downloading non-4K media, with pipes fast enough to stream live 4K, it's likely a non-issue.

For people not currently downloading media, the discussion is irrelevant:

> downloading 40GB takes too long; whereas streaming is popular.

Streaming the media would take (at best) just as long as downloading it.

The stick only has half the memory bandwidth of the Xbox 360 though.

Dont all 4K TV's have a 4K capable netflix app build in?

For the big brand TVs, yes. Most seem to have some set of Amazon and YouTube 4K support as well. My new TV is missing YouTube 4K support, because apparently they use a different codec than Netflix and Amazon.

>Not sure what difference the 4 in 764 It says it is a 4 core device.

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