Chromium Device Performance Evaluation

It is widely known that Google is busy workign on a Chrome OS device, which is a netbook with everything in the Chrome browser. It remains to be seen how cool it is, as this is essentially the biggest thing from Google after the evidently successful Android effort (so far).

Many people in the mobile device community is trying Chromium OS, the open source version of the Google Chrome OS. So how do we evaluate the performance of such a device? This article aims at giving you some preliminary information on Chromium device performance benchmarking: what are being tested, and what tools are used for now. If you are interested, go put Chromium OS on a USB drive and try it out.

Here is Chromium OS architecture, from top to bottom (source here).

Performance benchmarking on Chromium OS devices are mostly falling into two categories:

· General Linux system benchmarking, using tools such as Phoronix Test Suite  or lmbench .

· Browser performance benchmarking in the following areas:

o Javascript engine performance, using Sun Spider ;

o DOM parsing performance, using Dromaeo;

o Hardware-accelerated graphics rendering performance, using GUIMark2 , Microsoft Psychedelic test, Potato Gun  or Fish Tank

o HTML5 video performance; as of now there is no reliable way to do this as HTML5 video doesn’t provide an api to catch frame dropping events, or a way to determine the playback fps, according to author of GUIMark2;

For browser HTML5 support validation, vendors use this site: https://html5test.com/.

Latest Chrome browser canary build is 8.0.559.0 (https://tools.google.com/dlpage/chromesxs).

Some results on earlier Chromium OS using Phoronix Test Suite is here: . Other than this, there is no publicly available performance comparison of Chromium OS devices at this time.

A side note: major browsers (Chrome, IE9 , firefox 4) are all leveraging GPU for 2D/3D rendering.