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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."
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).
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.
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.