With the buzz surrounding the Pentium-M CPU, we decided to take a look at it ourselves and compare how it stacks against the current AMD and Intel offerings. Now the Pentium-M CPU by Intel is designed from ground-up to be a mobile CPU while all other CPUs found in notebooks today are designed as desktop CPUs and then tweaked for notebooks such as the Pentium4 M and all CPUs by AMD including the upcoming Turion.

We managed to get hold of a 2.0GHz/533FSB based CPU along with the DFI 855 chipset board. Keep in mind that the DFI board with the 855 chipset is for the older generation of Pentium-M CPUs running at 400MHz FSB so its not the optimal solution for testing this CPU. Intel’s 915 chipset for the notebooks is the 533MHz variant however it’s not available as a desktop board yet from any manufacturer.

While we won’t go in the details on the architecture of the Pentium-M CPU, we will briefly point out that the Pentium-M is more of a Pentium III with a longer pipeline and not much of  the extremely power hungry Pentium4.. The CPU that we have has a 2MB low latency L2 cache. This large cache’s job is to keep the Pentium-M’s pipeline filled and minimize any wasted cycles which result in wasted power. Keep in mind that we’re looking at a CPU designed for mobile usage and lesser power usage is very important. Something else that Intel worked on is the branch predictor to be more accurate, again, resulting in lesser wasted cycles and power consumption.

So what happens when you try to evaluate the Pentium-M in a desktop environment? For starters, you don’t get to enjoy the frequency of updated technologies that a desktop chipset brings along with itself. Intel has very recently released the 915 chipset for the notebook bringing technologies like PCI-E and DDR2 but we won’t have any desktop motherboards utilizing that chipset now. DFI is planning on releasing a motherboard based on this chipset however, the 855 chipset board that we have with us is showing its age with support for a single channel memory controller and AGP 4X. This chipset doesn’t offer true support for the new 533MHz Pentium-M CPUs but overclocking the FSB and reducing the multiplier solve that. Using the 4:3 RAM divider, we had the memory running at 183MHz (about DDR DDR360). That is the speed we’ve used to benchmark this CPU. Lets take a look at the rest of the testbed.

Memory:	2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 Memory Module
VGA Card:	nVidia GeForce 6800GT
Optical/Hard Drives:	ASUS 52X CDRW, Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM/8MB Serial-ATA
Monitor:	Relisys 19" Monitor
Operating System:	Windows XP Professional SP2

For comparison, we’ve chosen the AMD Athlon64 3500+ CPU which is a 2.2GHz CPU on an nForce4 platform using identical components as well as the Pentium4 3.4GHz CPU on the Intel 925X chipset platform using 2 x 512MB OCZ DDR667 memory modules (with loose timings) and the same set of remaining components. We used our usual blend of applications for testing which are as follows

CPI/Memory/HD:	PC Mark '04 CPU, Memory, Graphics and Hard Drive. Sandra 05 Memory Benchmarks
Graphics Benchmarks:	3D Mark 2001SE, 3D MArk 2003, 3D Mark 2005 and Aquamark3- Default Settings.
Full Games:	Doom3, UT2004, Far Cry, Counter Strike: Source at 1024x768 resolution
Audio/Video Encoding:	WorldBench: Jukebox, AutoGK with Pirates of Carribian DVD, WB: 3D Studio Max
General Applications:	WorldBench: Adobe Photoshop, Ahead Nero, Microsoft Office, Mozilla and Winzip
3D Workstation:	Cinibench 2003, WB: 3D Studio Max (OpenGL and Direct-X)

If you would like for us to add any additional benchmarking software, please email us at suggestions@tbreak.com