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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

Why not use Android sticks instead? For $60 you can get a quad-core with 2GB RAM, USB + HDMI + WiFi + BT and passively cooled. You can place dozens of them on a single rack. What would be Chromebook advantage here?

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These sticks definitely do not have the cooling capacity to run at full rated heat output 24/7. As you note, they're passively cooled. They don't produce any less heat than a Chromebook on the same SoC, they just throttle and downclock faster.

I meant "passively cooled" as their advantage. You can always place some Noctua on top of them if needed, you just don't have to. I have one of RK3188-based sticks which is enclosed in a passive case. I also run the latest Bay Trail NUC in passive mode 24/7 and its temperature is higher on heavy load than of that Android stick. Performance wise BT is about 2x as fast, though it depends on a task. 9W vs 14W at full load including OpenGL, 1W vs 4W at idle.

I got the impression that most of the sticks and devboards are only "mostly" debugged, and seem to fail under 24/7 intensive use. As a mass production consumer product, the Samsung Chromebook has gotten a lot more debugging work.

Also those sticks are mostly intended for Android use, whereas this application uses regular Linux.

I have a feeling those sticks wouldn't stand up as well to the sort of load this use case would require of them.

I suspect the latest smartphone SoCs would be as powerful as a Chromebook.

Bay Trail is about the same speed as Core 2 Duo or 1st gen Phenom. I assume Snapdragon 800, Mediatek MT6595 and new A57 chips are there as well, or even better. Soon we should start seeing chips approaching the speed of i3 on smartphone SoCs.

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