Goodbye Octane: Google finally kills off my favorite Chromebook benchmark tool

In preparation for a review we just filmed, I needed to run a few benchmarks to try and prove a point. These days, I rely far less on these types of tools and far more on what the actual end user experience feels like. After all, 10th-gen Intel-powered Chromebooks are still fast enough (especially the Core i5 and i7 variants) that you’ll never really have to think much about performance when using one of them.

With the rise of far faster small-core solutions from Intel (N100, N200, N305) and MediaTek delivering impressive numbers with their higher-end ARM chips like the Kompanio 1380, we’re getting to the point where performance on Chromebooks for general tasks is less and less of a concern. And that means benchmark numbers are getting really, really fuzzy these days. If I can’t feel the difference in a Speedometer 2.1 score of 200 versus 300 in actual use, does it really matter that much for most people?

Google Octane: my go-to benchmark

Still, I need a good benchmark every once and a while, and I do still like to see wildly-high numbers when a shiny, new Core i7 Chromebook crosses my desk. I know the performance overhead is largely unnecessary, but I like seeing all that power on display from time to time. And for me – an old Chromebook veteran – there’s been a constant, consistent benchmark I’ve gone back to time and time again to really get a feel for how fast a device truly is: Google’s own Octane.

Back when there were far fewer Chromebooks in the market, I could tell you within 1,000 points what a given Chromebook’s Octane score would be; and that precise measurement gave me a lot of insight on newer devices and how much faster they were than previous models. And this knowledge was very handy in a time where Chromebooks weren’t being outfitted with the latest available processors or even the best versions of those older CPUs.

Goodbye, Octane

But as time has moved on, we’re getting to the point where even Octane scores don’t mean too much any longer. It reminds me a bit of the days when everyone talked about AnTuTu scores for Android phones. I used to have a general guideline for what constituted a “fast” phone, but those numbers are so high these days (well over one million!!) that you could tell me an AnTuTu score and it would literally mean nothing to me. I feel like we’ve come to that place with Chromebooks a bit.

And though Google “shut down” Octane years ago, it left the venerable benchmark tool there for us to still use in conjunction with others. In addition, Speedometer, Jetstream, and others have emerged as fine substitutes that are constantly upgraded and tweaked to help produce reliable results. But Octane was always the simpler way for my brain to really process how much faster one Chromebook was versus another.

And now, it is truly gone. Navigating to https://developers.google.com/octane no longer brings you to a black screen with a golden-yellow “Start Octane” button. Instead, the URL now heads directly to Browser Bench’s JetStream benchmark, marking the end of an era for people like me. While JetStream and Speedometer are fine tools that both give solid and reliable results, I’m still sad to see Octane actually gone.

I suppose it is simply time to move on, and I’m OK with that. But it really does feel like the end of a very significant time not only for me, but for Chrome Unboxed, too. For many years, getting a new Chromebook was far more rare than it is today, and seeing if that new device delivered on real performance gains always came via Google Octane. And now, for the first time since we started all of this, that will never be part of the process again. Goodbye Octane. I’ll miss you.