Rockchip has never been known for their powerful hardware. Instead, they tend to garner a reputation for showing up in specialized platforms like portable gaming consoles, and in super low-power applications for the lowest of prices, such as cheap tablets and Android set-top boxes. Their latest piece of kit breaks the mold in a big way. The new RK3399 mobile chip is featured in the Samsung Chromebook Pro, among other devices, and a reference device featuring the chip has cropped up, with a full tour on YouTube that includes the AnTuTu score. It scores around the 75,000 range, safely blowing most other ARM-based Chromebooks out of the water.
This time around, Rockchip has outdone themselves. Although a modern high-end phone may score upwards of 100,000 on AnTuTu, getting into the 75,000 range indicates a processor that’s certainly no slouch. Most normal uses, from web browsing to gaming, will be absolute butter on this processor, a far cry from the likes of the Rockchip RK3288, which scores about in the 36,000 range. It even manages to blow NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 away, though the Tegra X1 in the Pixel C and NVIDIA SHIELD TV should certainly not feel threatened. The score is pretty great, but one should keep in mind that the Samsung Chromebook Pro’s score may differ a bit; this development device, called the Firefly-RK3399, is decidedly barebones, and is running on a modified version of Android.
The Rockchip RK3399 is able to push 4K video at 60 frames per second, and can even record the same. Given how current Chromebooks with benchmark scores around half of what this chip have achieved are performing, it’s a safe bet that the Samsung Chromebook Pro won’t have users leaving it in the dust while trying to multitask or do anything intensive, and should you feel like throwing an ARM version of Linux or any other compatible OS on there, should perform just about any task admirably there as well. For all intents and purposes, the Samsung Chromebook Pro stands to be the fastest ARM-based Chromebook yet. Essentially, with the price and feature list as it is, the Samsung Chromebook Pro is quickly shaping up to be not just the fastest, but the best ARM-based Chromebook on the market.