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More Analysis Of Pentium M Desktops
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."
For what reason are Athlon 64 processors not "stable"?
Every real geek has owned a dual proc. Intel machine.
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....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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.
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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?
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?
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
By your own logic, if AMD is better than Intel at the high and low ends, and in the ordinary they're "about the same", then it stands to reason that Intel isn't worth buying because AMD beats Intel in most areas.
Overclocking a $213 processor to compete with a $260 processor and calling the results close and the kids "cheap" seems a bit ridiculous. The price difference is $40 and overclocking is a pretty "cheap" way of getting more speed.
Who's being "cheap" here?
Yesterday's 'extreme' high-end is today's 'ordinary' high-end. AMD has been putting out some amazing processors for a couple years now, so if you're looking for an 'ordinary' high-end CPU check out some of their previous offerings. I've been running a 2800+ for over a year now under a lot of stress (I'm a programmer, gamer, and play around with a number of CG renderers) and it still holds up admirably.
This is not a sig.
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.
Translation: I am 14 years old and I have no need for any sort of stability in my "rig". I don't have to worry about getting any sort of real work done, so I play games all day and look at porn. If I can overclock a 3% performance increase, I'll cream my virgin shorts.
Better translation: I prefer superior hardware that also happens to cost less.
You're a troll, and should be modded as such.
A couple of more links
here and here.
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.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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.