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Intel Portables Hardware

Intel Releases New Pentium M Processors 190

Posted by timothy from the leapfrog dept.
doormat writes "Its been known for a while, but now it's official, as Intel releases Dothan, the 90nm version of Banias, aka the Pentium M processor. It also debuts Intel's new numbering scheme. The fastest new part is a Pentium M 755 2GHz w/ a 100MHz FSB, and 2MB of L2 on die cache. Reviews are starting to tip up as the NDA expires. One is at Tom's."
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Intel Releases New Pentium M Processors More

Intel Releases New Pentium M Processors

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  • Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by odano ( 735445 ) * on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @04:32AM (#9114919)
    For some reason I don't think it is a coincidence that intel basically stole BMWs numbering scheme...
    • Well since they have ceded the cutting edge and speed advantage to AMD's 64-bit CPUs they have probably been finding it harder to sell their chips
      on clock cycles alone.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Couple of more reviews of the Dothan I came across around the web as Tom's isn't the only site reviewing new kit.

      TrustedReviews - http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=428

      Digit-Life - http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/asus-m6000/asu s-m6.html

      PC Mag - http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/asus-m6000/asu s-m6.html
    • Does this mean some idiot with an intel based machine is going to cut me up now ?

    • Motorola embedded PowerPCs power those German luxury cars don't they?

      Just a tad ironic.

      • I think they do, but I couldn't find anything with Google. I do know from this [eetimes.com] however that the PowerPC controls the walking mechanism in Honda's Asmino, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was in their cars as well. I remember some silly rumor a few years ago that OS X was going to power the current Accords. I think it stemmed from that.
      • As an automotive supplier, we use lots of motorola CPUs in cars, but not quite to the power PC level. HC08 and the like. Automotive manufacturers are excessively cheap and will not pay for such a thing. Not to mention its power is wasted.

        One thing to note about the new intel numbering scheme is it directly removes revelance from AMD's numbering scheme. Intel is adding a meaningless first number as if to say "the first number is just for our purposes, you pay attemtion to the MHz." If people buy into t
        • There are a few automotive systems that use PPC, but for the most part that's only in the telematics side (OnStar and the like) - I see a ton of HCs, even some 68k stuff.

          Excessively cheap - too true. The excitement people have towards saving a penny per board scares me some times. I understand it, but it scares me.
          • Probably why OnStar is so expensive. I also heard it is yet to be profitable. But it works doesen't it :)

            We too are looking at other CPUs since Mot is still a little pricy and they really havent thrown themselves into the automotive thing full swing yet. Some of their chips could be more useful.
            • Mmm.

              I'm fairly sure that OnStar is slightly profitable for the manufacturer of the modules. I have no idea if OnStar/GM is making any money off of it.

              I also have no idea if Freescale is going to go after automotive business full-on once they seperate from Motorola; part of the problem for them has been that a lot of potential customers don't like buying from them, since they're the same company as one of their competitors (Motorola's automotive group). Motorola automotive gets the same problem, the othe
      • PPC doesn't power BMW's braking, engine, etc. systems, but if you get the fancy map/telematics packages, I know at least some of them do use Motorola embedded PPC processors.
    • For some reason I don't think it is a coincidence that intel basically stole BMWs numbering scheme...

      heh. If they did, the suits from BMW will be on them like Ballmer on a ham sandwich. They don't like *anyone* messing with their branding. You can't even use the three M colors together in anything BMW related unless you have special permission. The Germans don't play around.

      88 ///M3 owner

  • Naming Scheme (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm more excited about the change of naming scheme than anything else. I was afraid they were going to call it the Super-ultra-mega-fantastic PentiumEXTREME X32000. "Pentium M 755" sounds like a car.

  • Intel fanboys around the world do a 180... (Score:5, Funny)

    by rokzy ( 687636 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @04:36AM (#9114930)
    ...over an AMD-style rating system instead of GHz.

    the resulting transfer of angular momentum changes the Earth's orbit moving it slightly further away from the Sun.

    the increased distance and lower temperature makes cooling easier. AMD stock set to skyrocket.

  • The Bottom Line (Score:5, Informative)

    by haunebu ( 16326 ) * on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @04:37AM (#9114935) Homepage
    "In a direct comparison between the old Pentium M 1.7 GHz and the new Dothan with 2.0 GHz, the newcomer clearly manages to gain the upper hand. In some of the benchmarks, the mobile CPU produced with 90-nm technology is up to 22% faster. Even if you only consider the difference in clock speed between the two CPUs, Dothan still offers a 5% advantage.

    The results of the battery life benchmarks show the benefits of 90-nm process technology. The two test systems were identical, except for the CPUs, and gave nearly the same results."

    From here [tomshardware.com].

    • It's about 5% faster at the same clock speeds? Using the same amount of power?

      So nothing spectacular?

      • Re:So The Bottom Line Is... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by klui ( 457783 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @05:50AM (#9115132)
        Not sure how to read the comparison table between Banias and Dothan.

        Peak thermal power is 24.5W for Banias and 21W for Dothan. But it looks like average thermal power is 6W for Banias vs. 7.5W. Sleep power, deep sleep power, and deeper sleep power are all higher for Dothan.

        Does this mean if you're not doing a lot of number crunching, your battery life will be less than a Banias system? Maybe the cache has something to do with this... whatever. I would be more impressed if the power requirements were lower across the board. And the lower peak doesn't seem that low. What's the best case thermal advantage going from 130nm to 90nm of an identical circuit?

        • Re:So The Bottom Line Is... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by mczak ( 575986 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @08:11AM (#9115667)
          Does this mean if you're not doing a lot of number crunching, your battery life will be less than a Banias system?
          Yes. However, the difference is rather small (keep in mind the cpu is not the only thing drawing power, so that 1.5W difference is really not that much).
          Maybe the cache has something to do with this... whatever. I would be more impressed if the power requirements were lower across the board. And the lower peak doesn't seem that low.
          No, it's not because of the cache (actually, banias/dothan have neat tricks to reduce power draw of the cache). It's a direct result of 90nm vs. 130nm. Peak power draw goes down, because of the lower voltage needed for switching in the transistors. But idle current goes up, because if you reduce structure size, you get more and more leakage current (which, btw, is a huge problem nowadays - leakage current was basically 0 just a short while ago, but it goes up exponentially with smaller structures).

  • Some more Dothan reviews (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @04:38AM (#9114936)
    Couple of more reviews of the Dothan I came across around the web as Tom's isn't the only site reviewing new kit.

    TrustedReviews - http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=428

    Digit-Life - http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/asus-m6000/asu s-m6.html

    PC Mag - http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/asus-m6000/asu s-m6.html
  • Technology Today 2025, Intel releases ANOTHER Pentium CPU, the ZQX4055 with a slightly smaller die size, fibre obtic AI managed L1 cache and New Car Smell! NEXT!!!

  • In other news (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @04:43AM (#9114959)
    Intel now has more chip models then users. In their quest to sell to all markets at the same time, they now have have more then 6 billion choises, where the current planet population is about 5.2 billion.
    • Forsooth, in what yeare of our Lorde didst thou cometh across this olde giokke? Methinks the population of this worlde is at six thousande million now, 'twas at five thousande million when I was a wee childe.

  • This stuff seems to overclock nicely (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chep ( 25806 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @04:46AM (#9114970)
    ... and with quite decent per-clock performance, to boot:

    Here [x86-secret.com]

    (yeah, yeah, it's in French. Machine translate it for the text, and after all the pictures and chart don't need much of an explanation, do they?)

  • In other news ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by psergiu ( 67614 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @04:48AM (#9114975)
    AMD is switching to the Mercedes numbering scheme while releasing the two new processors: Duron A 160 and Athlon64 SLK 600 KOMPRESSOR

  • Welcome to the silly numbers (Score:3, Funny)

    by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @04:48AM (#9114977) Homepage
    I just can't wait until they start using really stupid and cryptic numbers, like the GPU companies :

    Will the Pentium 5 X159-XL-SE be more power full than a Pentium 5 X150-Pro-Ultra ? Or less powerfull than a X160-LE ?
    Does it compare to an Athlon 64 Dual FX-95e 4699+++ ? ...I think websites with benchmarks like toms' will get more popular...

    • Re:Welcome to the silly numbers (Score:5, Insightful)

      by martingunnarsson ( 590268 ) * <martin&snarl-up,com> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @05:34AM (#9115096) Homepage
      Those sites getting more popular is a good thing, right? Instead of just looking at the clockrate, people will actually compare performance. The average Joe has no idea what makes a P4 2.0 GHz better than a Celeron 2.0 GHz. They're the same speed for crying out loud! Yeah, you get the point.

    • Re:Welcome to the silly numbers (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @05:58AM (#9115155) Homepage
      Someone needs to make an open source benchmark on a bootable cd so OS doesn't matter, and no background apps can cause harm to it. Moving from MHz/FSB/Cache/etc to a single common rating # would make things a lot easier for the consumer. This would also spur more competition between the CPU companies, as they couldn't so easily obfuscate the true speed from their users.
      • There is no fair way to compare CPUs of different architectures (with synthetic tests).

        If you let companies into the bechmark design process, they will cheat (see 3DMark scandal).

        If you don't let companies into the bechmark design, then your benchmarks will never be able to squeeze "the most" performance out of anything, and how much performance you do get could be determined more by how you're testing then what you're testing on.

        Comparing CPUs is a very difficult task to do.. notice the reviewer ran mor

        • They just want to know how much faster their games will go, their videos will encode, and how much quicker photoshop will render their favorite filter. Those is very difficult to represent with a single, common number .. especially across architectures.

          So why can't a benchmark CD test these things ?
      • ...the problem is that different tasks are impacted differently by "MHz/FSB/Cache/etc" (not to mention the design of the chip). Obviously performance is also impacted by other system components (memory, hard disk, graphics card, etc). It's impossible to come up with a "single common rating #" - rating for what, exactly? There are however various benchmarks dedicated to measuring performance over 'typical' tasks (e.g. business applications, graphics, Quake III framecount, etc.)

  • laptop woes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ryan Broomfield ( 693349 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @04:48AM (#9114978) Homepage
    Laptops get faster but laptop users don't get any smarter. Every day I see people with a brand new processor and 128MB of memory on windows XP. They insist that their laptop is slow but refuse to spend the extra 50 bucks to get a decent amount of ram in the machine. oh well.
    • My laptop used to have 128MB ram, then I put Linux on it. KDE 3.1 runs wonders on it.
    • MISTA RYANS

      I got 512MB of RAM on my Laptop and it SCREAMS. I can play the shippy at many FPS.
    • man, my friend constantly complained about the speed of her laptop. i kept telling her that she can't run a modern OS with only 128mb of ram including a bunch of other apps and expect it to never page out to hard disk. *sigh* of course for $50 she could have fixed this, but constantly refused to spend even that much after spending $1000.

    • Re:laptop woes (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TheLink ( 130905 )
      I recently used a Pentium-M notebook with 512MB RAM, Windows XP and some junk on it (instant messaging stuff).

      It was slow. In one case it did lots of paging out for dunno what reason, then when I tried to switch tasks I had to wait a long time for things to page in and for the system to regain its senses.

      A 1GHz Duron, 128MB pc with Windows 2000 was more responsive and stable in comparison - same apps (two apps).

      From my experience with other XP machines, Windows XP is a downgrade from Win2K. The only adva
      • Windows XP also provides you remote desktop connection, the other feature found in win2k server. I suspect there is a connection here.

        In my experience Windows XP is much more stable than Windows 2000. I am aware that most people have had the opposite experience but I've bluescreened win2k repeatedly on every service pack that's been released to date. I have very rarely bluescreened XP since day one, and when I have it has generally been tracable to bad hardware (this was not true in all cases, however.)

    • That's true of computers in general, though. At work we'll spec someone a system to show them what we think they should buy, and then they go out and spec something else to "save money" and decrease memory from 512 to 128, then sometimes bump up their CPU, or add one of those useless Zip 750 drives to a system which comes with a flash drive and has a CDRW already. Then you have to explain the difference between physical and virtual memory to them, whee!

      I have 1GB ram in my Windows XP system, you might thi

  • What I don't understand... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drsmithy ( 35869 ) <drsmithy@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @04:49AM (#9114981)
    ...Is why more hardware vendors aren't using these CPUs in Blade configs. They seem perfect for high density computing power.

  • Hmmm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @04:54AM (#9114992)
    These new names seem about as useful as self confessed penis inches. Real world benchmarks?

    • Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Funny)

      by frozenray ( 308282 )
      > These new names seem about as useful as self confessed penis inches. Real world benchmarks?

      Your wish is my command:

      #!/bin/sh
      LC_ALL=C
      echo `uptime|grep days|sed 's/.*up \([0-9]*\) day.*/\1\/10+/'; \
      cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep MHz|awk '{print $4"/30 +";}'; free|grep '^Mem' \
      |awk '{print $3"/1024/3+"}'; df -P -k -x nfs | grep -v 1k \
      | awk '{if ($1 ~ "/dev/(scsi|sd)"){ s+= $2} s+= $2;} END \
      {print s/1024/50"/15+70";}'`|bc|sed 's/\(.$\)/.\1cm/'

      (stolen from someone's Usenet sig)

      "With a castle that big, do you

  • If you're interested in Intel's future processors and how they'll be numbered, please look at the handy chart available here [bmwusa.com].

  • Desktop (Score:4, Insightful)

    by moxruby ( 152805 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @05:06AM (#9115026)
    My ageing duron 1.3ghz does everything I want it to.
    If someone made a reasonably priced, Pentium-M desktop using low power and heat components, I would consider buying it. Especially if it had no fan.
    The energy savings alone would make it worthwhile.
    • The energy savings alone would make it worthwhile.

      Uh, over what sort of time frame ?

      • Re:Desktop (Score:5, Interesting)

        by BenjyD ( 316700 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @06:46AM (#9115259)
        Let's see:
        Intel Pentium-M 735 $294,21W
        Comparable Athlon-XP (2600-3000?) $170, ~70W

        Price difference = ~$120
        Power difference=~50W

        Electricity cost (UK prices, don't know any others)=$0.10/Kwh

        Time to break even=~2.7 years

        Which is about the lifetime of a processor, I guess. Of course, that's assuming you use both at 100% CPU constantly for three years.

        • Re:Desktop (Score:3, Informative)

          by mczak ( 575986 )
          Intel Pentium-M 735 $294,21W Comparable Athlon-XP (2600-3000?) $170, ~70W
          That's not really a fair comparison. You can get a Mobile Athlon XP-M 2600+ (mainstream) for $110, and it has a TDP of 45W. Yes, the Pentium-M still uses less power than the Mobile Athlon, but it's nowhere near as dramatic as your numbers suggest - and the price difference is even larger.
          • This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
        • Adding a fanless power supply, and solid state storage, so that they only way you realise your computer is turned on is the keyboard LED... Priceless.

    • Re:Desktop (Score:2, Insightful)

      by hsa ( 598343 )
      If someone made a reasonably priced, Pentium-M desktop using low power and heat components, I would consider buying it. Especially if it had no fan. The energy savings alone would make it worthwhile. Who cares about the energy savings? This baby would be *quiet* and you could really leave your machine on, while sleeping in the room.

  • Overclocking Dothan (Score:5, Informative)

    by mst76 ( 629405 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @05:10AM (#9115034)
    If you can read French, there's an article on x86-secret [x86-secret.com] where they opened a laptop, installed a big cooler, and overclocked a 2.0 Ghz Dothan to 2.4 Ghz. It remained stable during 2 hours of BurnP6 and stayed under 30 degrees C. The 2.4 Ghz Dothan beat the 3.4 Ghz P4 in all their benchmarks, and is comparable to the Athon 64 3400+.
    • O/C Dothan is pretty cool even when compare with top of the line P4 or Athlon-64
      x86-secret in English [google.com]. On the other hand, Althlon-64 3400+ has a core clock speed of 2.2GHz, slightly lower than that of the O/C Dothan (2.4GHz)... Of course, if we talk about processing power/power consumption, Dothan wins by a mile...

      Intel is starting to recover from the CPU design competition. The 3.4GHz clock speed P4 is just unnecessarily too high....
      • O/C Dothan is pretty cool even when compare with top of the line P4 or Athlon-64. (...) Of course, if we talk about processing power/power consumption, Dothan wins by a mile...

        Which begs the question, why isn't it a desktop processor already? Less power = less CPU fan noise, less power drain on system = less PSU noise, less heat in system = less case fan noise.

        Eventually, I think the PIV would be recognized as somewhat of a side-track in processor development. Imagine what Intel could have done if they h
        • Probably because Intel didn't realize how badly they screwed up till too late. Takes years from plan to tape out.

          Now they have to convince enough suckers to buy Prescotts till they turn things around.

          There's also the server market to worry about. Imagine an SMP Prescott server - 2 X 100+W in a 1-U, or how about quads 8-). Alternative? Does the Dothan/Banias support SMP? Does it work with popular server chipsets? So Dell will probably stick to Northwood for servers.

          Looks like it could be a really good yea
          • I'm too lazy to link in the article but right here on the front page of slashdot we just discussed the fact that intel is giving up on Prescott (once they have the new desktop versions of Pentium M out) because it's not scaling any more. Dothan/Banias will apparently become the basis of a new 2-core processor to replace Prescott, the way for which was paved by the HT P4, since people are used to having SMP-capable operating systems now. At least, the people with top-end P4 chips.
        • Which begs the question, why isn't it a desktop processor already?

          It doesn't beg the question, it raises the question. "Beg the question" is an archaic idiom that means "to assume as given the point being argued", e.g. "This painting is trash because it is obviously worthless." The word "beg" in this case means "to improperly take for granted", a usage of the word which we don't see anymore except in this one expression.

  • As soon as the new Centrino generation will be available on laptops and notebooks, there will be Linux information about Dothan machines here [tuxmobil.org].

  • Dothan / Banias Compatibility (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NeGz ( 629279 ) <nicc&rk0n,org> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @05:43AM (#9115119) Homepage Journal
    I don't suppose anyone knows if it the new Dothan CPUs are compatible with existing Banias notebooks at all? I very much doubt it, but I've not seen it expressly said thus far. It would be nice to be able to upgrade my ~3 month old 1.5ghz Banias to a Dothan, heh.

    Also, if they are not compatible, is Intel planning to take the Banias chips further, or will I be stuck at 1.7ghz max (or is it 2.2ghz?) until I buy a new one?

    Excuse me for being a little ignorant. :)
    • It is pin-compatible, but intel says you need a new stepping (b-step) of their chipset. I have no idea if these new steppings are already in use, or if it might run even with the old stepping unofficially. Also, the bios might not like it.
      At least a 2.13Ghz P-M (with 533Mhz FSB) is on the roadmap. Not THAT much of an improvement from the now available 2Ghz part though. Still quite impressive nonetheless.

  • I'm going to miss the good old days of MHz (Score:5, Interesting)

    by otter42 ( 190544 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @06:09AM (#9115178) Homepage Journal
    Yes, I know that MHz were somewhat misleading, but come on, they weren't that bad after all. While it was never true that a Pentium 3GHz was twice as fast as a Pentium 1.5GHz, it was nonetheless faster. And Intel's dominance forced AMD to give similar numbers (rounded up for inflation, of course) that helped us all compare.

    Now I have to wonder which new chips are faster. To (blatantly) steal from an earlier post:

    Will the Pentium 5 X159-XL-SE be more power full than a Pentium 5 X150-Pro-Ultra ? Or less powerfull than a X160-LE ? Does it compare to an Athlon 64 Dual FX-95e 4699+++ ?


    I hate the "consumer electronics" style of naming things, incrementing a model number in order to sell an inferior product. Who here honestly thinks that Intel won't do exactly this when they release a product that bombs? I still remember the to-do when Tom's Hardware published a pre-release review of the Pentium II, showing that it was inferior to a Pentium MMX of the same clock speed.

    What I would REALLY like to se is AMD seize the MHz banner now that Intel has abandonned it. I mean, now AMD doesn't have to give performance "numbers" to convince people to buy it. They could go back to simple MHz ratings, forcing Intel to keep itself honest. After all, we all know that the whole reason we all hated the MHz rating was because AMD had superior performance at inferior speeds and it just wasn't fair. I don't remember too many people complaining when AMD went back to MHz specs with the Athlons. Here's hoping to see it again soon.

  • Marketing (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @06:46AM (#9115258) Homepage
    From the article^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpress release:
    The new chip opens up advanced applications to notebook computer users like full-screen high-definition video playing and mobile videoconferencing, while keeping the PC relatively light, Intel said.
    Isn't that just what they said for the previous line of processors? If this new chip is needed for videoconferencing, are we to conclude that the previous chip couldn't do it, contrary to what Intel said at the time?

    (My point is, reprinting inane press releases does nobody any good.)

    I'm surprised that the marketing department missed the upcoming opportunity to label dual-core CPUs with 'twice' the clock speed, as is done for bogomips.

    • Re:Marketing (Score:3, Informative)

      by smcv ( 529383 )
      Bogomips *are* an objective measure, though. They're how many million times per second Linux can run a particular busy-loop, used for high precision timing (basically the same idea as how you did delays in old BASIC programs, i.e. FOR X%=1 TO 100000:NEXT X%, adjusting the large number down if you had a slow computer, or up if you had something blindingly fast like the 1.8MHz 6502 in a BBC Micro; ah, those were the days :-)

      In other words, they're an objective measure of how fast your CPU can achieve absolut

  • Digital Restrictions Management in Dothan (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Adam J. Richter ( 17693 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @09:10AM (#9116209)
    From The Register [theregister.co.uk]:
    The dark side of Dothan also reared its head, briefly. When asked why Intel was introducing a new naming scheme for Centrino, Chandrasekhar replied that the numbers represented more of "goodness measure" and reflected features that were not necessarily "performance enhancing", such as Le Grande. Le Grande is Intel's contribution to TCPA-compliant lock-down computing,and allows large media companies to impair the user's ability to exchange media files, such as their favorite songs. So you can see why Le Grande isn't "performance enhancing", and quite the reverse. [...]

    Here is a link about TCPA as a threat to free software [againsttcpa.com].

    Slowing TCPA adoption is enough of an benefit to me to prefer a TCPA-free processor even if it costs $50 more for the same performance. I just hope I'll have that option for a while, as Intel is not the only company promoting TCPA.

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