Intel's Pentium M Desktop Part II: ASUS' Pentium M to Pentium 4 Socket Adapter
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 24, 2005 1:31 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
With the CT-479, ASUS has effectively demolished all other desktop Pentium M solutions. There's no reason to even consider an 855GME motherboard from AOpen or DFI; the ASUS solution is cheaper, better performing and is even a much more stable overclocker. Kudos to ASUS for a job extremely well done with the CT-479. It's the only option that we'd recommend for those interested in a desktop Pentium M system.
That being said, despite being paired with enough memory bandwidth, the Pentium M continues to fall behind in desktop performance. As a gaming platform and as a general purpose/office machine, the Pentium M does fairly well, but it is in content creation, workstation and media encoding applications that the Pentium M continues to fall behind. Part of the problem is that the Pentium M needs clock speed to compete, which we saw when we overclocked it up to 2.56GHz. But even at 2.56GHz, the Pentium M wasn't a competitive CPU when it came to tasks like media encoding, indicating that if the Pentium M is to succeed on the desktop, it's going to need some architectural improvements.
At this year's Spring IDF, Mooley Eden (head of the design team who brought us the original Pentium M) diagramed the architectural features that would be improved in the next version of the Pentium M (code-named Yonah). All of the architectural improvements, outside of the move to dual core, involved SSE and floating point performance - the two major weak points of the Pentium M's present day desktop performance.
It would appear that Intel is doing their best to make the Pentium M even more desktop friendly in Yonah. While ASUS has done the best that they can to give the Pentium M a hospitable desktop environment today, we may have to wait until Yonah for it to make a lot of sense on the desktop.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
48 Comments
View All Comments
Houdani - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
With updates to floating point calculations and adding another core, Intel will need to think long and hard about putting their desktop chips into premature end-of-life in favor of going forward with the PM as their base product.Or, to summarize:
Blah blah blah nothing new that hasn't already been said before blah blah blather.
mlittl3 - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Anand,You completely missed the point of the excellent data you obtained. Of course, this is just my point of view but here is my take on things.
The Pentium III stopped at 1.4 GHz. The Pentium picked up at 1.5 GHz (not including the low and ultra low voltage versions). We all know that the Pentium M is much more similar to the Pentium III than the Pentium IV. What if Intel never created the Pentium IV and continued improvements with the Pentium III? We would have had the Pentium M three to four years ago.
Intel screwed us all with its monopoly powers and sold high clock speeds to the masses with no thought about the performance of the Pentium IV. The last four years have shown us just that but no one complains or holds Intel accountable. As you have pointed out numerous times, the capital processor of the Pentium IV series, the Pentium IV EE is a complete waste of money.
In almost all of your benchmarks, the Pentium M shows almost the EXACT same performance as an Athlon 64 clock for clock. I say again, what if the Pentium M was developed at the time the Pentium III was discontinued? Intel and AMD would have matched clock speeds and we would have a Pentium M around 2.6 GHz right now with the similar performance of the Athlon 64 FX-55. The improvements you mentioned in the conclusion for Yonah (SSE and floating point) would probably already be implemented.
The Pentium M is THE processor from Intel. We had to wait four years for Intel's monopoly to be weakened but now we have a processor worth something. With multiple cores (each running at the speed of single cores since the Pentium M runs so cool) and all the other improvements from Yonah, that processor is going to be awesome.
Thank god for AMD challenging Intel with their terrific Athlon 64 architecture. Without them, computer processing would be in the dark ages. Guys, we need to stop supporting companies when they get to a certain size. The market needs to shift or we are going to get software like Windows and processors like the Pentium IV. With an even market share split between at least two companies, technology will excel past our wildest imaginations.
Okay, I will shut up now. I do want to add one thing. The ASUS adapter does nothing over the Aopen motherboard. If I am not mistaken, you compared a 533 MHz FSB, 133 MHz faster Dothan Pentium M to 400 MHz FSB, slower Dothans (I hope the other processors were Dothans and not Banias). The performance delta between the 770 and the 750 is exactly what you would expect from a faster clocked processor and a faster FSB. The 865 vs. the 855GME had nothing to do with the performance difference. The only advantage of the ASUS adapter is a cheaper overall cost of ownership.
bob661 - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Oh yeah, if you're going Intel, this is the only CPU to own.bob661 - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Intel really needs to lower the price of this CPU. A 765 is $645 on newegg. I can only imagine what the 770 would cost. If it was more price competitve, the P-M would be an excellent processor choice.rqle - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
i thought it did pretty well clock for clock on majority of the benchmark against the amd64 and did on par or so on gaming against the amd FX chips. Where it exceeds the PM it deal extremely well, and falls really shorts on things it didnt fair to well.Price wise for a "Desktop", i still believe AMD64 chip is the way to go. Great notebook chip that is not quite ready for the desktop area yet, need to improve its floating point performance and some desktop area. Did pretty well as gaming chip.
clarkey01 - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Multitasking..lol...I mean, your going to get Intel fanboys saying " Its only has a 400 MHZ FSB" and what not. Well, why has it > ? its like saying the FX only has one meg cache, why doesnt it have two ?
clarkey01 - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Mixed bag or what.Aileur - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
All in all seems like a middle of the pack solution. I thought the dual channel would give it a more significant boost but the pentium m seems to stay in the middle of the pack most of the time.I would still get it before i ever touched a prescott with a ten foot pole (and im an ex northwood user) but for the price theyre asking for dothans I dont see it being the desktop chip killer i was expecting.
I wonder though how Intel could clock this thing if it didnt have low power/heat in mind.