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Comment by magila | Hacker News Reader

It seems the "core myth" has replaced the "MHz myth" among computer buyers. Those low-end quad core phones and tablets are most likely using "little" ARM cores like the Cortex-A53 or A55. These cores are very small in terms of die area which why you can get four of them very cheaply.

Meanwhile that dual core Celeron is using Intel's performance cores which are much larger and several times faster than those ARM cores. Even for multithreaded workloads the Celeron will run circles around cheap quad core ARM SoCs.

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Not sure if this is the case, Celerons are just plain bad…

e.g. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_celeron_n450...

Single thread performed is kind of close, 860 is faster though. And let’s not even look at the MT benchmarks. And generally it seems that most medium/high end chromebooks with ARM cpus are generally able to outperform x86 ones.

Snapdragon 7c Chromebooks do indeed outperform the Pentium-based machines…

Says more about Intel’s Atom line than anything tbh.

That’s because it’s an atom-type CPU core, and not a good one (the good ones are called “Atom”). A laptop with this CPU basically is using the “efficiency core” from a recent laptop but as its main core.

There are plenty of Core-class x86 ChromeOS laptops and these smoke all ARM-based laptops excepting Apple’s.

You're comparing an Atom based Celeron, which is the bottom of the barrel for Intel CPUs and not something which often shows up in Windows laptops, to a top-of-the-line Snapdragon SoC. The wholesale price of the 860 is probably 2-3x that of the N4500.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_celeron_n402...

The N4020 is the model of Celeron used in the 2021 Dell Chromebook. I'm seeing N3060, 2955U, etc.

The Pentium Silver N5000, which isn't badged as a Celeron, is still much slower on multi-threaded and single-threaded perf: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_pentium_silv...

The entire Snapdragon 865 package cost manufacturers $150-$160. The Pentium Silver N5000 retails for $90-100. The 860 would presumably be even cheaper than the 865.

That's dell basically ripping consumers off.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Celeron-7300-Processor-B...

Is the latest celeron which should be more or less equal to a 6th gen i7 while using a lot less power. They are selling a 3 year old celeron in a 2021/2022 chromebook which is inexcusable.

Acer sells a chromebook with an i5 that's routinely $430 refurbished (yes it's a refurb but it's basically always available) https://acerrecertified.com/chromebooks/?_bc_fsnf=1&Processo...

>The entire Snapdragon 865 package cost manufacturers $150-$160. The Pentium Silver N5000 retails for $90-100. The 860 would presumably be even cheaper than the 865.

Sign. I would be surprised if dell is buying the Pentium N5000 along with chipset for more than $60. And that is excluding marketing rebate.

Not always. My recently deceased Thinkpad 13 chromebook with an Intel 3855U held up despite lacking support for multithreading. My HP Mini 311 with an N270 played HL2 and CS pretty well for a single core processor (yes, the Nvidia ION helped).

Currently rocking a Lenovo chromebook Flex 5i with an i3-1115G4 and it's outperforming my phone's Snapdragon 845 in rendering video animations by a reasonably well margin.

Yes, but my M1 spends all day with the efficiency cores trucking along at about 50%.

I actually misplaced the magsafe cable before I had to charge it the first time. The little cores make the right perf/watt tradeoff for all but the heaviest workloads, such as slack. Sometimes slack pops onto a performance core for a few seconds at a time.

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