Intro
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.
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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.
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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.
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| 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
PC Mark/Sandra
| PC Mark 04: CPU |
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| PC Mark 04: Memory |
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| PC Mark 04: Hard Disk |
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| Sandra 04: RAM Floating |
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| Sandra 04: RAM Integer |
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Pretty much whats expected here- the lower clocked 2.0GHz CPU with its single channel memory controller cant really show much in sythetic benchmarks.
3D Marks/Aquamark
| 3D Mark 2001SE |
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| 3D Mark 2003 |
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| 3D Mark 2005 |
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| Aquamark 3 |
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Lots of people use the above benchmarks which is the reason we throw these in there and looking at the numbers above, it seems as if the Pentium-M can certainly hold its own. Lets take a look at some actual games next
Gaming Benchmarks
| Doom 3 |
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| Far Cry |
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| Unreal Tournament 2004 |
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We must say that we're quite impressed with the results posted by Pentium-M above. While the Pentium4 isnt the best gaming CPU, keep in mind that the Pentium-M is 10% slower clock-wise compared to the Athlon64 above and running on a single memory channel.
Photoshop/Office/Mozilla/Winzip
| WB: Adobe Photoshop |
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| WB: Microsoft Office |
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| WB: Mozilla |
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| WB: Winzip |
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Wow- the Pentium-M surprises again. This time, it manages to perform as well as both the CPUs in everyday applications which is what this CPU is designed for.
Audio/Video Encoding
| WB: MusicMatch Jukebox |
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| AutoGK: Divx Encoding |
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| WB: Adobe Premiere |
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| WB: Microsoft Windows Media Encoder |
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Audio/Video Encoding doesnt look like one the strongest points of this CPU which the Pentium4 handles quite well.
3D Workstation Performance
| Cinebench |
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| WB: Discreet 3D Studio MAX (Direct X) |
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| WB: Discreet 3D Studio MAX (OpenGL) |
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3D Workstation performance is also not the best with the Pentium-M
Conclusion
Lets recap. The Pentium-M performed quite well in games and everyday applications like Microsoft Office and Photoshop. It didn’t do too well in 3D Workstation and Audio/Video Encoding benchmarks and part of the reason for that is its weak FPU which is understandable as most of us tend to do that kind of stuff on our heavy duty desktops.
One thing that we haven’t touched on is the power consumption of these CPUs. Since they were designed for notebooks, they don’t require or consume much power. While this may not necessarily be an issue for people using one or two PCs at home, it could translate into reasonable savings for companies running hundreds of PCs. Unfortunately we don’t have any means of measuring power consumption- we would’ve liked to see this as much as you would. The chip also runs very cool and the HSF unit supplied with the DFI board looks more like a chipset cooler than a CPU cooler. BSIO readings reported the CPU operating at about 34 degrees.
We did get a chance to test the overclocking and our particular CPU performed reasonable well. The stock speed for this particular CPU is 133 x 15 = 2000MHz and we managed to get it upto 15 x 175 which resulted in 2625MHz- 600Mhz or 30% over stock which is not bad at all.
Last thing to talk about is the price. These CPUs are on the expensive side and so are desktop motherboards like the DFI 855 that you can use the Pentium-M on. ASUS does have a converter that lets you use the Pentium-M on some of their motherboards and we will surely be taking a look at this shortly. We will also try to get the new 915 chipset board designed for the 533MHz Pentium-M featuring all the new technologies such as PCI-E, DDR2 and SATA. This should hopefully be sooner than later and should give us an even better idea on the performance of the Pentium-M compared to today’s desktop hardware. It would certainly pay off to wait a while.
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