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Intel Releases New Pentium M Processors
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."
Couple of more reviews of the Dothan I came across around the web as Tom's isn't the only site reviewing new kit.
8
u s-m6.html
u s-m6.html
TrustedReviews - http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=42
Digit-Life - http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/asus-m6000/as
PC Mag - http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/asus-m6000/as
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.
Blue skies, Barthy Burgers, girls...
Couple of more reviews of the Dothan I came across around the web as Tom's isn't the only site reviewing new kit.
8
u s-m6.html
u s-m6.html
TrustedReviews - http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?art=42
Digit-Life - http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/asus-m6000/as
PC Mag - http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/asus-m6000/as
Here
(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?)
Umm.. no. First its Quad-pumped, meaning that it acts like a 400MHz bus. I believe the P4 at 800MHZ quad pumped is somewhere in the 6GB/s range. So this should be sufficent since the architecture is less dependant on bandwidth.
You could even bother to do a back of the envelope calculation.
BW = (100*10^6)(4)(2 words)(4bytes/word)/(1024^3 GB/byte) = 2.98 GB/s
So yeah, its sufficent.
If you can read French, there's an article on x86-secret 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+.
TrustedReviews
Digit-Life
PC Mag
The a tag is your friend...
As soon as the new Centrino generation will be available on laptops and notebooks, there will be Linux information about Dothan machines here.
Check again:
HP to sharpen blade with Pentium M
And don't forget: high end servers don't use bleeding edge processors since they need some extra time to certify the hardware.
its quad pumped, like DDR but more so. its effectively a 400MHz bus
AMD chips have implemented the HLT opcode for many years.
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 absolutely nothing, hence the name bogomips (= millions of bogus instructions per second).
Old x86s generally do about a bogomip per MHz, newer ones (Pentium and up) do 2 bogomips per MHz due to different pipelines and such, so yes, they really *can* do twice as much nothing per clock cycle.
Of course, how fast a CPU can spin round and round a redundant loop has little relation to how much actual work it can do, so the only things bogomips are useful for are high-precision timing and pointless boasting.
(Different CPU architectures run different busy-loops in that part of the kernel, so in any case bogomips aren't directly comparable between architectures anyway. My G4 manages a little less than one PowerPC-bogomip per MHz.)
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.