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Intel Hardware

More Analysis Of Pentium M Desktops 347

Posted by timothy from the rocky-start-does-not-mean-doom dept.
Hack Jandy writes "The Pentium 4 has gotten enough attention lately as a slow, over heated monstrosity; but does Intel's Pentium M fare any better? Intel's decision to introduce the Pentium M as a desktop processor (East Fork) may not be all it's cracked up to be. Sudhian has an in-depth article, and Anand has benchmarks (on Linux!). I will stick with my Athlon 64, thank you very much."
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More Analysis Of Pentium M Desktops More

More Analysis Of Pentium M Desktops

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  • Failed Pentium (Score:5, Funny)

    by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @08:39PM (#11205276)
    So is Pentium M just a bunch of failed Pentium processors that didn't fare well in the assembly line? Sort of like Celeron... cough cough.

    • No, it's a "new" (sorta) architecture apparently based on the Pentium III's architecture. It lacks some of the more advanced features of the P4 and even Celeron lines but it's lower power and will actually beat a Pentium 4 clock for clock in some applications.

      • Re:Failed Pentium (Score:3, Interesting)

        by 0111 1110 ( 518466 )
        and will actually beat a Pentium 4 clock for clock in some applications.

        Actually make that all applications. At least clock for clock. It also tends to beat the Athlon64 clock for clock but that's a much closer race. The P4 is such a marketing-driven dog of a processor. Thank god I will never have to own one.

  • Pentium M clocks down too much (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dotslashdot ( 694478 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @08:39PM (#11205277)
    My experience with Pentium M is that it clocks down BIG time if you don't plug in the power cord. So much so that the laptop is virtually useless. YMMV.
    • Then turn it off in the BIOS and quit complaining?
    • I had this same problem too, and I could not turn it off in the BIOS. My 1 Ghz chip ran at 500Mhz most of the time, even when plugged in.
      • Was it a Pentium III or a Pentium III-m? Are you using linux? Linux doesn't support the earliest version of speedstep on the Pentium III. If I start my laptop up without ac power then it will remain on 500Mhz no matter what, and it will stay on 700Mhz if I booted the computer with ac power. The speedstep options in the kernel specifically state that this version is not supported.

      • Re:Pentium M clocks down too much (Score:4, Informative)

        by Covener ( 32114 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @10:26PM (#11205939)
        I had this same problem too, and I could not turn it off in the BIOS. My 1 Ghz chip ran at 500Mhz most of the time, even when plugged in.

        The info returned by /proc/cpuinfo will only reflect how things looked when you booted, but it doesn't mean your CPU speed isn't changing. see cpufreq (/proc/cpurfreq)

    • Re:Pentium M clocks down too much (Score:5, Funny)

      by Bloater ( 12932 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @09:25PM (#11205575) Homepage Journal
      > My experience with Pentium M is that it clocks down BIG time if you don't plug in the power cord. So much so that the laptop is virtually useless.

      Funny, my desktop does the same...

    • Re:Pentium M clocks down too much (Score:4, Interesting)

      by n1ywb ( 555767 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @09:33PM (#11205624) Homepage Journal
      I've been using my Fujitsu Lifebook P5000 1GHz P-M for a few months now, and I have to say I don't really notice the performance difference when it clocks down. It's still perfectly useable. The only time I really notice it is when I'm compiling or something, and even then it's pretty fricking fast IMO. People are spoiled by fast CPUs nowadays, consarnit.
      • People are spoiled by fast CPUs nowadays, consarnit.

        Yes, yes, procs are very fast these days, and all these young whippursnappurs are impatient young wags. However, wouldn't you be pissed off if you shelled out several hundred dollars extra for a fast proc that always runs at half speed?
    • Only if you set the SpeedStep setting in the BIOS to "maximum battery life" or some such. Mine ramps up perfectly well from 500 to 1700 MHz when crunching, whether plugged in or not.

    • That's totally bogus.

      If you are running a modern, ACPI-enabled OS, processor speed is fully controllable by the OS. My Pentium M sits at 600 MHz all the time, unless I need it, and then it throttles up to 1700 MHz as needed. My guess is that you are running Windows, since Linux uses the highest clock speed unless you install a throttling daemon (I use speedfreqd.)

      I do know, however, that the Pentium 4-M throttles down a ton, because its power management features are less efficient and the battery life would be less than an hour. As it is, most only get 1 to 2 hours.

      What OS are you running, anyway?

    • On my Dell 600m laptop, it doesn't permanently clock down, but instead adjusts the clock speed down until you're using an application, upon which it'll clock up to maximum speed. Pentium M chips have multiple behaviours depending on what you set it to do.

      This application lets you switch them if you desire.
      http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/

      It depends on how you set your laptop 'power saving mode' in the control panel, normally, but this makes it explicit. The "Dynamic switching" function will allow it to
    • That's entirely configurable. Under Linux, on my Pentium-M laptop I run cpufreqd, which allows you to configure exactly how you want the clock speed to change under power conditions and cpu load. If the CPU load goes up, mine cranks all the way up to full speed again.

      I believe that the Windows drivers allow you to do the same thing, if you want.

  • Best place for AMD systems (Score:5, Interesting)

    by augustz ( 18082 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @08:45PM (#11205315)
    I've gotten old enough that I no longer thrill at the idea of building my own system. I'm looking for something quiet, very reliable, and inexpensive. Performance comes behind these critiera.

    Basically I'm looking for the Dell equivelant in the AMD world, someone who cranks them out in great quantities. I checked out HP etc, wasn't blown away. Also open to a smaller shop if they come with a good recommendation (and without the insanely gaudy cases, no rounded plastic please).

    • Basically I'm looking for the Dell equivelant in the AMD world, someone who cranks them out in great quantities. I checked out HP etc, wasn't blown away. Also open to a smaller shop if they come with a good recommendation (and without the insanely gaudy cases, no rounded plastic please).

      Just because you dislike the idea of building your own system doesn't mean you should ignore white boxes from the dodgy-bros. local store. IME, you get exactly the parts you want, there's no proprietary crap and you get it
      • I did this with my last system. I even had them test boot it in the store. It turns out though that that about 80% of the time the system has trouble with BIOS, a known issue with the motherboard being finnicky it turns out.

        The small place doesn't have a great return policy. Basically, once you've purchased the CPU / Memory / MB etc you own them.

        I've put together a TON of systems myself, and I'll be honest, until you've tested a combo of MB/CPU/Mem a significant number of times it is hard to guarantee rel
        • I've put together a TON of systems myself, and I'll be honest, until you've tested a combo of MB/CPU/Mem a significant number of times it is hard to guarantee reliability, there are a lot of little edge cases that you can spend a lot of time working on.

          Never had this problem - but then I generally go for a standard big-brand MB and RAM: it doesn't make much of a difference in cost. Maybe I've just been lucky, but I would have thought that if you're not overclocking things and not playing around with dodg

    • Re:Best place for AMD systems (Score:5, Funny)

      by mollymoo ( 202721 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @09:10PM (#11205480) Journal
      I've gotten old enough that I no longer thrill at the idea of building my own system. I'm looking for something quiet, very reliable,

      So buy a Mac.

      and inexpensive.

      Oh, OK, don't buy a Mac then :)

    • Re:Best place for AMD systems (Score:4, Interesting)

      by St. Arbirix ( 218306 ) <matthew.townsendNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @10:10PM (#11205831) Homepage Journal
      I would have said Netlux but they recently pulled a fast one on me [netlux.com]. My laptop from them is an oversized clunky beast... but it's a 2.00Ghz machine from the summer of 2002 that cost me $1100, an amazing deal at the time (Clemson school laptops were $1500 1.5Ghz IBMs).

      And talk about dependable... I've taken it apart about 5 times, once to paint the exterior with my own designs, cut holes in the casing, etc and it still works fine. Occasionally the flourescent light for the LCD would flicker out but that was just a matter of opening her up, unplugging the screen, and plugging it back in a couple times. The parts are all Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba, and other brand names... the laptop runs really hot and sometimes the harddrive (Toshiba) will click a few times and stop working on me which has been happening for a year and just a matter of letting it cool down. Since I never actually move the laptop (there are 6 firewire drives daisy-chained off of a poorly placed 4-pin port in the front center of the laptop) I plan on shelling out the slot fan and copper radiator in favor of some cheap water-cooling experiment (hopefully involving a decorative waterfall).

      My basic point is that a well rated off-brand computer store from pricewatch.com will land you with a Volvo among computers that outruns Miatas, isn't winning design awards, and despite the fact that sometimes it shuts off by itself or won't start immediately it can always be depended on to come up with a few retries and not get any worse with age (my girlfriend's 1984 tank/Volvo is just like this).
    • Have you looked at eMachines? no really don't laugh, Mine(T2200SE) has been great to me (the motherboard was replaced, but it wasn't their fault I screwed up when I was trying to update the BIOS) My old one (533id2) was great for years, and will probably soon be given to my brother's friend who needs a computer, My brother has one, my girlfriend has one, one of my friends has two, another friend has 3 or 4 of them.

      The design of their recent and semi recent ones is compact and, while looking nice on the fr

  • A very neat processor indeed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by elh_inny ( 557966 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @08:45PM (#11205320) Homepage Journal
    When I browsed through the test, I headed directly to the database section and I was positively surprised, P4M excels in this area.
    In my computing I actually find hard disks to be a bottleneck. I use databases all the time and any improvement in that area is a plus.
    I bet Gentoo fanboys will lament on processor's performance while compiling, I think it has more to do with the lack of the optimisations yet and what's even more important I don't compile much, I just use the computer.
    Overall I find this processor to be a very attractive solution for a typical desktop computer.
    It's a great base for a SFF or even smaller computer with more than adequate computing power.
    • It would be much appealing if it wasn't $500 (sans motherboard). The performance it's impresive indeed, but AMD still runs faster (and all of this in 32-bit software, which is half of what the Athlon-64 CPUs can do). For desktops, it doesn't make much sense, even considering the (marginal) power savings - i want to see what Intel comes up with next, their "next-gen" CPU architecture. Things will get interesting then.

      As it is, it's a terrific processor for portables, and maybe blade servers. There're b
    • I was positively surprised, P4M excels in this area.

      It is not P4M. Aside from the FSB and the latest SSE version, Pentium M is not even remotely based on the Pentium 4 core.

  • Review focused on gaming (Score:5, Informative)

    by Man in Spandex ( 775950 ) <prsn,kev&gmail,com> on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @08:47PM (#11205334)
    http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=dot hangaming&page=1

    and it shows how differently it performs compared to things like compiling a kernel in linux. According to the review, it competes almost as fast or sometimes as fast as the A64 in some games.

    It's still an impressive cpu and better than tha bacon-cooker (prescott).

  • Pentium M (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MrRuslan ( 767128 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @08:48PM (#11205337)
    I have no clue why would anyone buy this. I mean Pentium M is great for laptops because of the lower power consumption but there is very little to gain from it on the desktop. It is very overpriced for a standard workstation onfiguration where somone dosent need power. I mean it saves power but not enogh to make it worth the trouble.

    • Re:Pentium M (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mollymoo ( 202721 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @09:17PM (#11205533) Journal
      I have no clue why would anyone buy this. I mean Pentium M is great for laptops because of the lower power consumption but there is very little to gain from it on the desktop.

      Noise. If you produce less heat you don't need as much cooling, so you don't need to shift as much air. Moving air through a PC makes noise.

      Other than noise, the lower power consumption may not help much for a single PC, but saving 40W per PC when you have 200 or 2000 can add up. Remember you often pay twice for you PC's power consumption - once to heat the air and once for air-con to cool it again.

      • Reductions in air conditioning needs actually far outweigh reductions in power. Most of people's energy bills come from A/C.

        • Re:Pentium M (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 )
          Reductions in air conditioning needs actually far outweigh reductions in power.

          The energy cost of cooling is usually less than the energy cost of making heat. Usually it is about 10:1 on a decent A/C system, it takes 10W of electrical power to remove 100W of heat.

    • Re:Pentium M (Score:5, Insightful)

      by afidel ( 530433 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @09:41PM (#11205674)
      electricity is expensive and certainly isn't getting cheaper. If you can get a new box with a Pentium M and a LCD then you are going to use less power even for a more capable rig. This might not matter for your home PC, but it matters if you are running an office with a couple hundred PC's or a business with thousands of them. It also matters if you want a box capable of decoding video but don't want a bunch of noisy fans, or if you run on alternative power. A capable, low power cpu is definitly going to find a niche for itself. Oh yeah and throw 4 of them on a die with a couple megs shared cache and you now have a chip that draws about the same amount of power as a P4 but kicks its butt all over the place on multithreaded code.
    • The Pentium M is a combination of the P3 and P4. The P4 is still slow at very high clock speeds compared to Athlons because of the long pipes. The doesn't. So a P3 running at speeds of a P4 makes for a faster processor, if I've read correctly.

      Remember how the P4 was slower than the P3 when it was introduced? They assumed a high clock speed would have fixed this problem, instead it just made a lot more heat. I've seen a 3.4 ghz P4 get hot enough to burn skin.
    • performance, low noise level and low power consumption
      take a 2 ghz cpu overclock it to 2.5 with stock cooling
      you get a cpu that rocks away everything for games with peak temperature around 50 C with the small stock cooler

    • Re:Pentium M (Score:3, Informative)

      by MemoryDragon ( 544441 )
      The Pentium-M is a kickass desktop processor, it just has not the brand GHz on its package. Still one of the fastest there is, excellent power management (which is a big plus on a desktop where you dont want to hear fans all the time and where you idle 99% of the time anyway)

      The main problem is the price, it is just much to pricey compared to an AMD64, I probably will go the AMD 64 route in the middle of next year because they also have a good power management. The main selling point for AMD64 for me is

  • But the article says... (Score:5, Informative)

    by obeythefist ( 719316 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @08:48PM (#11205343) Journal
    That the Pentium-M isn't optimised at all for what they were benchmarking (apart from some stuff compiled with a non-commercial intel C compiler).

    While I'll be one of the first to put my boot into intel and their behind-the-market sloppy overpriced inefficient CPUs, it would be at least fair to do it on a reasonably even playing field.
    • That the Pentium-M isn't optimised at all for what they were benchmarking (apart from some stuff compiled with a non-commercial intel C compiler).

      Because God knows that all the software in the world is compiled with a highly optimized commercial Intel C compiler right? Come on guys, why do you expect them to use some crazy expensive compiler when 99% of the software on the shelf will never use it? It's just a marketing gimmick to boost their performance. If nobody uses it then it might as well not exi

    • The thing is, that nobody really compiles with the Intel C++ compiler. Certainly, nearly all Linux software is compiled with GCC, while nearly all Windows software is compiled with Visual C++. In practice, not using Intel C++ *does* level the playing field.

  • Every geek... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doolspin ( 844298 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @08:57PM (#11205407)
    Every real geek has owned a dual proc. Intel machine.
    • Every real geek has owned a dual proc. Intel machine.

      No...every REAL geek can remember saving up for their first math co-processor.

      • Re:Every geek... (Score:3, Funny)

        by FFFish ( 7567 )
        Every real geek can remember the first time they took a soldering iron to the motherboard to piggyback 4k RAM chips in a hack to double the memory of their machine.
    • I built myself a dual P3-1ghz machine about 2 years ago and haven't looked back since. The only problem is that I bought a cheap motherboard based on the i810 chipset--I'm stuck at 512 megs of RAM and a 133mhz fsb.

      It still runs Linux beautifully.

    • Every real geek has owned a dual proc. Intel machine.

      Only problem is that my dual processor Intel machine is a dual slot-1 P3 450MHz box... built back when this machine was state of the art. But the processor speeds skyrocketed so rapidly that this machine became utterly worthless, virtually overnight. It still runs fine, and runs Linux pretty well, but still rather slowly by today's standards. The motherboard won't support any better processors without using PowerLeap adapters, and the cost of a pair of

  • 64-bit goodness (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pp ( 4753 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @08:59PM (#11205422)
    Was unfortunately left out. I mean, Athlon 64 makes a fine Pentium 4 competitor when running a legacy 32-bit operating system, but it's so much more. Those cool extra registers you get in 64-bit mode make the thing just scream!

    And no, the intel EM64T stuff isn't even competing in the same league, 40-45% slower with 40% more GHz is what I've seen in real-life workloads (heavy numbercrunching). For some other types of loads it does just about as well as the a64/opteron, though.

    Revised x86_64 support (possibly in the pentium m core and in the same price range as the new 90nm a64's) and Intel has a chance. That and Microsoft delaying 64-bit Windows for a couple more years.

  • Bus speed is the big issue (Score:5, Informative)

    by StandardCell ( 589682 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @09:07PM (#11205461)
    If you look at the front side bus speeds of the Pentium M, they're low. Very low, in fact, at 400MHz. Certainly not in the 800MHz -1066MHz range that's required for a lot of operations. A 1.5GHz P-M is about the equivalent of a 2.4GHz P4 Northwood UNLESS it comes to data-intensive operations requiring FSB access, and then it gets constricted.

    Let's reserve judgment on the P-M's future unless and until Intel builds a higher FSB speed or unless the biggest priority is low overall system power.
    • If you really looked, you'd find that the newest one comes in 533MHz FSB.

      I really don't know what operations require 800MHz and up for best performance (I/O intensive vs. compute intensive), but if East Fork is a reality, I bet that faster FSB speeds are in the works for a desktop version. The lower FSB was intended to minimize power consumption, which is a major priority on power sensitive laptops, but even if a higher bus speed means a couple extra watts, I doubt it would make a difference even in the f
    • (blink)

      What operation *requires* a 800-1066MHz bus speed?
  • Never have figured out if the Pentium 3 or 4 flags are what you are supposed to use. Forms seem to be split down the middle of calling it one or the other. I used the Pentium 3 config without any issue, but I know there is someone out there who knows....
  • Shouldn't that be "echo 600000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_setsp eed"?
  • Though AMD Atlon may be rising as a global giant, Intel's Pentium processors still holds a major share of the market primarily because the large choice of processors it offers, the number of years it has been in business and compatibility with a large number of OS and softwares not to mention hardwares. I believe that Intel is going to stay in business atleast for some more years. What do you think?

  • Is AMD really that much better for games? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Saint Stephen ( 19450 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @09:22PM (#11205563) Homepage Journal
    It seems to me that midrange AMD is far better than midrange Intel for games -- so this is probably why the impression "AMD rules for games" is out there. Buncha kids with no money think it is.

    But my 3.2 P4 Northwood running at 3.52 with 6800GT seems plenty competitive -- with everything except the FX 55, which is *extraordinarily expensive*.

    It seems that AMD is better at the low end and the extreme high end, but the "ordinary" high end (3500+ and 3.2 P4), Intel and AMD are about the same. Plus with things like MPEG encoding and compiling, which is also important to me, P4 beats even the AMD FX.

    So AMD is only better than Intel at the extreme high end and the low end. But the low end isn't worth playing at, unless you ain't got no money.

    So in short it seems to me that in the real world a 3.2@3.52 P4 is plenty great for games.

    Or would an AMD 3500+ give me a "smoother feeling" experience?

  • Has Intel Peaked? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by upsidedown_duck ( 788782 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @09:23PM (#11205564)

    Opteron is better than Xeon in most ways that matter. Itanium, even with all its FP muscle, has to be given away. Has Intel peaked?
  • I wonder if that sudhian is carring a 'sploit. I went with javascript enabled (loaded both at the same time though, so it *could* be anandtech). Fortunately, running Linux, there is no fscommand protocol, but if that fs stands for filesystem - then boy am I glad my browser doesn't support it.

    Doesn't seem to be happening with javascript disabled.
    • From www.macromedia.com: Macromedia Flash can use the fscommand action to control the playback and appearance of standalone projectors, as well as launch external applications. The fscommand action takes two parameters: a command and an argument. In some cases, an argument is not required.

  • Intel is trying to shift the battle, not catch up (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @09:29PM (#11205605)
    My parents and the bulk of the people out there do not need a 64bit 5ghz monster under their desk. And honestly most of thosethat have them probably only use the power 5-10% of the time, if that.

    Intel could care less about us, they care about Fortune 500 companies that buy computers by the truck load... and what those companies care about is saving money. 5-20W here and there don't really mean much to you and I, but when you're footing the electric bill for several hundreds or thousands of people then giving everyone barn burners to run Excel starts to look pretty foolish.

    You might as well be comparing a Prius and a Ferrari or a jumbo jet and an SR-71.

    Use the right tool for the job folks.
    • 5-20W here and there don't really mean much to you and I, but when you're footing the electric bill for several hundreds or thousands of people then giving everyone barn burners to run Excel starts to look pretty foolish.

      You really think so? Where I work monitors (big 21" CRTs) are left on 24/7. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen anybody sit down at them. It's always roasting and the lights never go off.
    • My parents and the bulk of the people out there do not need a 64bit 5ghz monster under their desk. And honestly most of thosethat have them probably only use the power 5-10% of the time, if that.

      You know, 10 years ago I was saying the same thing about the bulk of the people not needing a 32bit 1 gHz monster under their desk. Now this is the minimum that they need.

      Don't underestimate Microsoft's ability to make software that brings yesterday's supercomputers to their knees today.

      --jeff++

    • Use the right tool for the job folks.

      Most companies should be using low cost, diskless workstations whose only job is to connect to powerful servers where the real work is done, that can be easily managed by a small staff, instead of giving everyone a full fledged PC, which for most business users, is nothing more than fertile soil for viruses, trojans, and worms, and is a maintenance nightmare for I.T. staffs.

      In my opinion... :)

      • I agree the times are ripe for the reintroduction of Thin client deployment, obviously a UNIX varient would be the right tool, perhapse even thin clients which pooled resources, data storage taken care of by a NAS and an image server for the initial loading of each machine. It would be weird having a few thousand 3-400 MHz Geode CPU based machines logging on to a distributed cluster which was running on each machine but it would do several things.

        1. it would be Frickin' cool
        2. it would be cheap compared t
  • I've been using a Pentium M Dell Inspiron 8600 for the past week (configuring it for a friend)

    I've had nothing but luck with it, it's warm at worst and the fan comes on for 90 seconds every 25 minutes when it's sitting on a soft pillow (practically covering ALL vents in the machine)

    It browses very fast, it's responsive and it plays back movies fine

    Absoloutely no qualms here, an Athlon 64 would be far hotter, far noiser and (potentially) less stable.
    (intel chipset / cpu in a laptop is just the only way to

    • It browses very fast, it's responsive and it plays back movies fine

      No argument that you're happy, but tasks like these require at most a 768 Mhz machine, which is probably what it's stepping down to when the power cord's unplugged.

      The article poster is talking about more computationally intensive tasks.

      (Browsing these days on almost every computer is limited by the speed of the internet connection, not the computer's CPU performance.)

      • Actually I find browsing nowadays is limited to the shitty browser and the way windows works with files on the hard disks etc.

        If you pump up the threads in firefox and tweak it a little bit plus defrag you can get pages to load fast.

        I'm betting under 98 it could be even quicker as smartdrv was an awesomely fast caching tool whereas XP's is a little safer but ass slow in comparison

  • I'm so glad I have a Pentium IV Mobile (Score:4, Informative)

    by digitalgimpus ( 468277 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @10:04PM (#11205787) Homepage
    My ideal laptop for college was an Apple G4, but school insisted on Windows for it's 'stability, reliability, and security'.... yea, that's a joke in itself.

    Decided to get an IBM Thinkpad with a Pentium IV Mobile.

    Everyone with laptops running P4's seen to have issues with heat, and power consumption. Despite my oversided screen, dual HD's, and CD-RW... I'm actually doing all right.

    It cost more to get a laptop with a real mobile chip, rather than just a P4 as some companies offer... but I think it saved me a lot of trouble.
    • I'd still get a Powerbook and run Virtual PC, if the performance is any good.

      What is the performance of VirtualPC like on PPC? Anyone know? Emulating a PPC would be slow on x86, being CISC, but how fast is it to emulate a CISC on a RISC processor?
    • First of all, you will only find P4 "Mobile" in P4 laptops. Non mobile versions draw too much juice and have heat dissipation of at least 100W.

      Second of all, Pentium-M blows the doors off P4 "Mobile" while at the same time running much cooler and consuming much less power.

      Third, I type this from a 20" iMac G5. Envy me. :0)

  • I actually read the review, and... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @10:43PM (#11206040)
    I think the blurb on the front page was quite misleading. I was pretty blown away by the performance data of the Pentium M. It was on a crappy board with prehistoric features, and it was still kicking ass. It overclocked perfectly to 2.1 Ghz and beat a standard-clocked A64 3500+ on almost every benchmark, and never broke 40C with a tiny little heatsink and a tiny little fan.

    If Intel were serious, they could be making these right now at 2.4 GHz (I'm sure they'd run fine, and still quite cool) at which point it would be beating every desktop processor in the world. I say that's a hell of a start for an Intel processor line. The most important thing is that with such a low heat output, Intel can eventually clock these things pretty high. The Athlon64 seems to have less headroom.

    One clear lesson is that the Pentium4 and everything based on it is done. The P4 gets creamed by the M, it's quite embarassing. I think Intel will just ride out the P4 advertising investment, but we know that their next big thing involves the M cores. And they will be quite fearsome once they start putting multiple M cores into desktop chips, and putting their marketing muscle behind the result.

    I'm a huge AMD fan and will remain loyal, but... I think AMD is in a good place now only because they've consistently out-engineered Intel since the first Athlon. Now I'm scared that they won't pull it off in the next generation. Intel seems to have a really promising starting point.

  • the pentium M is amazing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 0111 1110 ( 518466 ) on Tuesday December 28, 2004 @11:53PM (#11206414)
    A couple of more links
    here [extremetech.com] and here [x86-secret.com].

    At the moment AMD is kicking Intel's arse in the performance sector. The pentium M (Banias) is the only remaining tech that Intel really has. Lots of chickens have come home to roost now that Intel's super-ultra-mega clockspeed boosted chip has reached the end of the line.

    For the sake of a continuing healthy, competive market even the most die hard AMD fans had better hope that Intel gets back on track and allows some engineers to actually make some product decisions for a change. The Banias core seems to be their only hope.

    I have found all of these recent benchmarks to be rather amazing. It's tough for anything to beat an overclocked Pentium M in games even with the huge disadvantages of an aging platform without all the latest goodies. Intel should be embarrassed. Deeply. Their Pentium 4 is a disgrace.

    It is clear that for anyone who cares at all about power consumption, heat, or noise, nothing can touch a Pentium M, not even a Cool n' Quiet enabled 90nm Winchester Athlon64. If Aopen releases a desktop motherboard with the upcoming alviso (PCI-E, DDR2 etc) chipset, things could get very interesting indeed.

  • Did AMD run on a 64-bit OS? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jeppe Salvesen ( 101622 ) on Wednesday December 29, 2004 @08:46AM (#11208279)
    It seems to me that Anandtech didn't run the Linux benchmarks in 64-bit mode for the AMD processors. Given that they are giving an indication of processor performance, they should allow AMD to use that extra gear. It's there to be used!

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