03-14-2021, 12:55 PM
Yep, large caches are expensive. So most chip vendors are focused on building chips that have small caches but still look good on useless benchmarks.
This is particularly true of ARM vendors who are in a very competitive market. But if you run something like a browser on these chips it runs very sluggish because the cache is continuously being trashed. I won't be surprised if the RK3399 benchmarks better than a low end Intel Celeron (4MB cache). However the Celeron will beat most ARM chips in real world usage. It is no surprise that most low end Chromebook still use Celeron.
From a software perspective ARM presents an interesting challenge for Linux desktop software. Because of the limited software user has to do many task in the browser. Android on the other hand has a lot of native applications which unlike a browser based app can run very efficiently even on a low end ARM.
This is particularly true of ARM vendors who are in a very competitive market. But if you run something like a browser on these chips it runs very sluggish because the cache is continuously being trashed. I won't be surprised if the RK3399 benchmarks better than a low end Intel Celeron (4MB cache). However the Celeron will beat most ARM chips in real world usage. It is no surprise that most low end Chromebook still use Celeron.
From a software perspective ARM presents an interesting challenge for Linux desktop software. Because of the limited software user has to do many task in the browser. Android on the other hand has a lot of native applications which unlike a browser based app can run very efficiently even on a low end ARM.
