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."

Comments

Pentium M clocks down too much

[dotslashdot]

My experience with Pentium M is that it clocks down BIG time if you don't plug in the power cord. So much so that the laptop is virtually useless. YMMV.

Re:Pentium M clocks down too much

[n1ywb]

I've been using my Fujitsu Lifebook P5000 1GHz P-M for a few months now, and I have to say I don't really notice the performance difference when it clocks down. It's still perfectly useable. The only time I really notice it is when I'm compiling or something, and even then it's pretty fricking fast IMO. People are spoiled by fast CPUs nowadays, consarnit.

Re:Pentium M clocks down too much

[MooseGuy529]

That's totally bogus.

If you are running a modern, ACPI-enabled OS, processor speed is fully controllable by the OS. My Pentium M sits at 600 MHz all the time, unless I need it, and then it throttles up to 1700 MHz as needed. My guess is that you are running Windows, since Linux uses the highest clock speed unless you install a throttling daemon (I use speedfreqd.)

I do know, however, that the Pentium 4-M throttles down a ton, because its power management features are less efficient and the battery life would be less than an hour. As it is, most only get 1 to 2 hours.

What OS are you running, anyway?

Best place for AMD systems

[augustz]

I've gotten old enough that I no longer thrill at the idea of building my own system. I'm looking for something quiet, very reliable, and inexpensive. Performance comes behind these critiera.

Basically I'm looking for the Dell equivelant in the AMD world, someone who cranks them out in great quantities. I checked out HP etc, wasn't blown away. Also open to a smaller shop if they come with a good recommendation (and without the insanely gaudy cases, no rounded plastic please).

Re:Best place for AMD systems

[shellbeach]

Basically I'm looking for the Dell equivelant in the AMD world, someone who cranks them out in great quantities. I checked out HP etc, wasn't blown away. Also open to a smaller shop if they come with a good recommendation (and without the insanely gaudy cases, no rounded plastic please).

Just because you dislike the idea of building your own system doesn't mean you should ignore white boxes from the dodgy-bros. local store. IME, you get exactly the parts you want, there's no proprietary crap and you get it all at the cheapest price (you generally get a discount for buying a system, so getting someone to put it together for you works out cheaper than doing it yourself) You don't need to pay for a useless OS, either. And if something does go wrong with a part, it's no sweat to replace it yourself even in the unlikely event that the shop won't - you save so much you'll still be ahead on the deal.

Re:Best place for AMD systems

[St. Arbirix]

I would have said Netlux but they recently pulled a fast one on me. My laptop from them is an oversized clunky beast... but it's a 2.00Ghz machine from the summer of 2002 that cost me $1100, an amazing deal at the time (Clemson school laptops were $1500 1.5Ghz IBMs).

And talk about dependable... I've taken it apart about 5 times, once to paint the exterior with my own designs, cut holes in the casing, etc and it still works fine. Occasionally the flourescent light for the LCD would flicker out but that was just a matter of opening her up, unplugging the screen, and plugging it back in a couple times. The parts are all Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba, and other brand names... the laptop runs really hot and sometimes the harddrive (Toshiba) will click a few times and stop working on me which has been happening for a year and just a matter of letting it cool down. Since I never actually move the laptop (there are 6 firewire drives daisy-chained off of a poorly placed 4-pin port in the front center of the laptop) I plan on shelling out the slot fan and copper radiator in favor of some cheap water-cooling experiment (hopefully involving a decorative waterfall).

My basic point is that a well rated off-brand computer store from pricewatch.com will land you with a Volvo among computers that outruns Miatas, isn't winning design awards, and despite the fact that sometimes it shuts off by itself or won't start immediately it can always be depended on to come up with a few retries and not get any worse with age (my girlfriend's 1984 tank/Volvo is just like this).

A very neat processor indeed

[elh_inny]

When I browsed through the test, I headed directly to the database section and I was positively surprised, P4M excels in this area.
In my computing I actually find hard disks to be a bottleneck. I use databases all the time and any improvement in that area is a plus.
I bet Gentoo fanboys will lament on processor's performance while compiling, I think it has more to do with the lack of the optimisations yet and what's even more important I don't compile much, I just use the computer.
Overall I find this processor to be a very attractive solution for a typical desktop computer.
It's a great base for a SFF or even smaller computer with more than adequate computing power.

Pentium M

[MrRuslan]

I have no clue why would anyone buy this. I mean Pentium M is great for laptops because of the lower power consumption but there is very little to gain from it on the desktop. It is very overpriced for a standard workstation onfiguration where somone dosent need power. I mean it saves power but not enogh to make it worth the trouble.

64-bit goodness

[pp]

Was unfortunately left out. I mean, Athlon 64 makes a fine Pentium 4 competitor when running a legacy 32-bit operating system, but it's so much more. Those cool extra registers you get in 64-bit mode make the thing just scream!

And no, the intel EM64T stuff isn't even competing in the same league, 40-45% slower with 40% more GHz is what I've seen in real-life workloads (heavy numbercrunching). For some other types of loads it does just about as well as the a64/opteron, though.

Revised x86_64 support (possibly in the pentium m core and in the same price range as the new 90nm a64's) and Intel has a chance. That and Microsoft delaying 64-bit Windows for a couple more years.

Re:Big Surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I own an amd64 and I'm a independent programmer/security expert. I run only Linux (Gentoo if you must know, troll what you will it gets the job done) and I have tons of stability. The lovely gigantic GPR and extra XMM regs make the entire system so much more powerful. Recompile glibc while rendering video and running john-the-ripper nooo problem, bring it on! And the people who OC on amd64 are just tards, isn't the thing strong enough for you, do you really have to risk your hardware because you think your l337 wind0wz OCer. Also I don't wear shorts, I wear pants like a real coder.

Re:But the article says...

[AKnightCowboy]

That the Pentium-M isn't optimised at all for what they were benchmarking (apart from some stuff compiled with a non-commercial intel C compiler).

Because God knows that all the software in the world is compiled with a highly optimized commercial Intel C compiler right? Come on guys, why do you expect them to use some crazy expensive compiler when 99% of the software on the shelf will never use it? It's just a marketing gimmick to boost their performance. If nobody uses it then it might as well not exist.

Intel is trying to shift the battle, not catch up

[Anonymous Coward]

My parents and the bulk of the people out there do not need a 64bit 5ghz monster under their desk. And honestly most of thosethat have them probably only use the power 5-10% of the time, if that.

Intel could care less about us, they care about Fortune 500 companies that buy computers by the truck load... and what those companies care about is saving money. 5-20W here and there don't really mean much to you and I, but when you're footing the electric bill for several hundreds or thousands of people then giving everyone barn burners to run Excel starts to look pretty foolish.

You might as well be comparing a Prius and a Ferrari or a jumbo jet and an SR-71.

Use the right tool for the job folks.

Re:Nothing wrong with a PM

[AbRASiON]

Actually I find browsing nowadays is limited to the shitty browser and the way windows works with files on the hard disks etc.

If you pump up the threads in firefox and tweak it a little bit plus defrag you can get pages to load fast.

I'm betting under 98 it could be even quicker as smartdrv was an awesomely fast caching tool whereas XP's is a little safer but ass slow in comparison

Re:I'm so glad I have a Pentium IV Mobile

[Anonymous Coward]

I run VPC on a 1.5GHZ G4 with WindowsXP pro.

It is useable, but only just. It works fine for what I want (some netmeeting, visio and IE testing) but if you were using programs in it all day I think you'd get frustrated.

Also, based on my extensive testing (fiddled around with an imac for 5 mins in a shop) VPC7 on a 1.8ghz G5 doesn't seem to be any faster than my 1.5ghz G4.

Re:Failed Pentium

[0111 1110]

and will actually beat a Pentium 4 clock for clock in some applications.

Actually make that all applications. At least clock for clock. It also tends to beat the Athlon64 clock for clock but that's a much closer race. The P4 is such a marketing-driven dog of a processor. Thank god I will never have to own one.

Re:I'm so glad I have a Pentium IV Mobile

[lachlan76]

I'm a Linux user, and use x86 assembly enough that I don't expect to switch in the near future.

So I just use VMWare, which is IMHO one of the greatest closed source programs I have ever used.

Re:Review focused on gaming

[katorga]

I'm seriously thinking about a Pentium-M for my next homebuild for one reason: QUIET. I've had it with multiple fans, massive heatsinks and the noise from top of the line amd/intel chips.

The P-M would be a perfect chip for a media center or SFF gaming rig. 95% of the performance of an AMD 55FX or P4 3.6 at half the cost and 20% the heat is nothing to sneeze at. And that running with slow ram and agp 4x. Last time I checked a 55FX as $800ish, a P4 3.4EE or 3.8 was $700ish, and the 2Ghz P-M is only $400ish.

And Anand is missing one fact on the compiler front. GCC may not have great P-M support, but Intel gives away their optimizing compiler for Linux.

Given the heat characteristics of the Pentium M, Intel could likely put 4 on a die for the same heat cost as a dual core Prescott or a dual core AMD64. It remains to be seen if they can overcome their Hubris and give the Isreali chip team the ball.