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Centrino Mobile Equals Desktop Pentium 4 in Speed
Spy Handler writes "On Wednesday during the launch of its new Sonoma Centrino Mobile, Intel put on a demonstration running a video game on a laptop. It matched the performance of a high-end Pentium 4 desktop running the same game, declared Intel. The contenders were a laptop sporting a 2.13 GHz Pentium M processor, 1GB RAM, and the Alviso chipset versus a desktop with a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 with hyperthreading, 1GB RAM, and the Grantsdale chipset. Is this a testament to how far the Pentium Mobile architecture has come, or a sad comment on the clockspeed-pushing design of the Pentium 4?"
Intel's finally learning the lesson everyone else knew about 5 years ago. Too little, too late? Or can Centrino save them?
Is this a testament to how far the Pentium Mobile architecture has come, or a sad comment on the clockspeed-pushing design of the Pentium 4?
I think it's a testament to the fact that whatever game they were running doesn't bottleneck at the CPU. Most video games are not CPU-limited beyond a GHz or two.
hmm I would like to know which video game it ran to get equal performance. Also, was the game software rendered or was there a graphics chipset involved?
> Is this a testament to how far the Pentium Mobile architecture has come, or a sad comment on the clockspeed-pushing design of the Pentium 4?
No, it's probably only a testament on not showing enough info about the benchmark system/conditions to provide any useful technical data, but only marketing data.
Who know? Maybe the game was simply framerate limited by the similar integrated graphics chipset.
I'm not saying that the Pentium M isn't fast, or as fast as a desktop P4; only that probably that demo don't prove that.
Just my 2c.
Bye!
SeqBox
Yes. Hell, i would put two, but they're still to damn expensive (and so are the motherboards for it). I hope that changes in the near future though, the P-M is a terrific processor.
Centrino is the Pentium-M with a wi-fi chipset. I think the article was meant to highlight the pentium-M's performance versus the pentium *4* performance
I am sure that they got together with NVidia and came up with some crazy optimized drivers (read: cheating).
Sounds like Intel is ready to write off the P4 as done for, and is putting all of thier eggs in the Centrino basket until the launch of their dual-core chips...
that your mature, fast chip that people have been designing for for the better part of a decade combined with spanking new memory and hardware works well! my god, it boggles the mind! carl not like that's stopping me from representin with a wack AMD64 chip and gear that makes the inside of my tower a good substitute for a microwave oven(tea, anyone?))
...with the fan attached or without?
I had the "pleasure" of performing a heavy number crunching on a P4 laptop. Luckily it was winter and one of the rooms in my house is unheated. Leaving the laptop there (temp. about +3C) with bottom lifted off the floor by some books to allow free access to the built-in fan prevented it from entering thermal throttling mode and allowed it to run at full speed...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I 'upgraded' from a P3-1 ghz to a P4-2.26 ghz and noticed hardly any difference. I upgraded from my P4 to an Athlon64 3400+ and it not only smokes it, it also has a variable clock speed which only ramps up when needed.
I've been a loyal intel user since the Pentium 90 came out, but after building several cheap and stable AMD systems for friends and family I took the plunge myself, and I'm more than happy.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
As an earlier poster mentioned, most newer games depend more on the GPU than the CPU; anything over 2Ghz is almost overkill.
Intel and AMD are in the awkward position of needing to create a market for new processors in a world where a 1Ghz processor will do most office tasks brilliantly. They pushed speed, speed and more speed for so long that the average consumer doesn't give a whit about HyperThreading or anything else. Tech heads and researchers and universities are different, but is that enough to support to very large chip manufacturers forever?
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
Centrino is fine and dandy, but I still want a little bit more speed than that. I want a Pentium M, but I also want to know how it really is vs that desktop. I would really like to have the fastest thing for a new laptop, as judged by experienced people. So Intel, come on and test all your chips against that 'fast' desktop!
FYI, Centrino is the same thing as Pentium M. Centrino just means you bought a laptop with a Pentium M processor and Intel's wireless chipset. bundled together. Why, oh why does Intel insist on giving everything some crappy marketing name and confusing customers?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Is this a testament to how far the Pentium Mobile architecture has come, or a sad comment on the clockspeed-pushing design of the Pentium 4?
Or perhaps a testament to how fill-rate limited the game was? Honestly, what was the game? Doom 3? Or Monkey Isnald 3? It makes a difference.
Refuse to make a statement in your sig!
They don't really mention any of these factors about the laptop. What good is having good performance if it weighs 10 pounds and has a battery life of an hour?
Monstar L
Its time to do what we used to do back in 1990 before the Pentium arrived, run benchmarks to determine how fast the machine is.
The only interesting thing about using a game as a benchmark is if the thing will run. Its not unusual to find that a game simply does not run on a laptop.
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Is this a testament to how far the Pentium Mobile architecture has come, or a sad comment on the clockspeed-pushing design of the Pentium 4?
Yes.
That's part of the beauty of the Pentium M: most of the notebooks based on it are in the 6lbs or less range, and I've yet to see one with a battery life of less than four hours.
As I had mentioned in a previous comment, the front side bus speed is the biggest limiting factor on Pentium M processors. The day we see an 800MHz FSB Pentium M is the day the direct MHz comparisons will apply (i.e. 1.8GHz P-M vs. 1.8GHz A64). Even the Tom's Hardware Guide review of the new Sonoma chipset for P-M shows fairly marginal gains and proves the FSB is the limitation, PLUS they do the stupid thing here and put in DDR-2 which does little for performance but increases system costs.
The poser of the question (that started this thread) signals his ignorance of microprocessor design and underscores what AMD has said all along, and everyone else who hasfollowed the industry since when there was much more competition in the microprocessor, namely you can't juxtpose microprocessors on clock frequency alone. Anyone remember the Intel i860? Or when MIPS was a stand alone company competing against Intel (seemingly). If you say no to these things, that probably explains why you're even pondering this stuff. Nothing to ponder, some of us have known this all along.
It's a shame all the benchmarks disagree. Have a look at Benchmark
This benchmark also shows that a Pentium M 2.3 (Yes it is overclocked) is as fast as a AMD Athlon64 FX-53 (2.4 GHz)
One area where Pentium M is fantastic is in scientific and engineering simulation software. My company produces such a piece of software called OrcaFlex (www.orcina.com). The code is mainly old fashioned 8087 FPU instructions doing 3 dimensional vector operations.
In the past few years clock speed has become much less important than memory architecture in determining how fast the simulations run. Of current architectures P4 stinks and is comprehensively stuffed by Opteron. However, PM even beats Opteron. Our fastest machine for OrcaFlex is a DELL Centrino notebook! This just edges out our top of the range Opteron workstation.
Has anyone else out there seen anything similar with other applications?
It's a valid point. the question: "Is this a testament to how far the Pentium Mobile architecture has come, or a sad comment on the clockspeed-pushing design of the Pentium 4?"... I'd say the latter. The pentium mobile architecture hasn't come a long way, it's been dragged along by AMD's use of similar technology (hell, and even IBM with its PPC970) to run better at lower clock speeds.
It's a sad comment on how damned long the clockspeed-pushing went on for.
So what.. if Intel is going to compete with AMD, they need to make a 64 bit version of the P-M chip. AMD already has a mobile Athlon 64.
Here is a link to a benchmark that show that intel might be right.
This benchmark shows that a Pentium M 2.3 (Yes it is overclocked) is as fast as a AMD Athlon64 FX-53 (2.4 GHz) in many games
You do have a point here: for most games all you need is a decent graphics card; I mean, in some cases you don't even need that: fable on the XBox look very good and is fun to play. However I must say that my IBM T42p (dothan) laptop just feels much more responsive than my P4 2.6 desktop, especially for scientific applications having a 2MB cache makes all the difference!
Would someone explain to me the point of having a wifi device inside the processor? Does it vastly improve performance or reduce power consumption? I personally would think a typical addon card is preferrable. If your network changes usb standards, you don't have to replace your processor.
In the good old days, when the P-III was being replaced by the P-IV, you could roughly multiply the P-IV speed by 0.6 to get the comparable P-III speed. (Specifically, a 2Ghz P-IV was about the same as a 1.2Ghz P-III.)
So a P-IV at 3.6 Ghz, is roughly equal to a 2.16 Ghz P-III.
And guess what? The Pentium-M is a repackaged version of the Pentium-III core.
Maybe Intel and AMD and the rest of the world will start using something useful, like SPEC results to market their processors, instead of Hz ratings?
Also you can generally turn off HT in the bios, if you're really interested in seeing what effect it has.
I tried it with 3DMark2003. Turning off HT makes a very small increase in performance.
I had a professor who still swears by the P3-based Xeon for his work and that it will always smoke anything that the P4 has to offer. Why? Strong integer performance.
The professor I speak of is Bob Hyatt, and his research is on computer chess (specifically Crafty, the chess engine we all know and love). The reason the P3-family of chips does such a good job with it is because of the strength of integer calculations. Dr. Hyatt has repeatedly stated that there is not a single floating point instruction to be had in Crafty.
However, the FP unit in the P3 sucks big time. Intel made a processor with a much longer pipeline in order to improve floating point performance--FP is now world class, but the integer stuff won't be as good as it was with the P3 family. (The shorter pipeline is what makes the Athlon a superior performer in some aspects to this day.) This is why we slashdotters are always screaming that raw clock speed will never indicate the supreme chip.
Bah. I have a 10 pound laptop, plus accessories, an external drive and a leather case, the whole package comes out to around 18 pounds; HT'd 3.0 P4m or whatever runs games okay; it's just when you need to do anything that involves shuffling a lot of memory around that you notice how goddamn slow laptops are. I proudly walk a mile to work each day with that thing slung over my shoulder. You'll never hear me complain about laptop weight.
...cos I'm too busy complaining about perpetually sore shoulders. I sleep terribly at night, and just yesterday I pulled a calf muscle crossing the street.
But it's all worth it when I ask some sucker to "hold my bag for a sec". Nerddom has its price.
The P-M chipsets etc. do not support SMP. Maybe later.
3.6 GHz is more speed than 2.13 GHz!
It's like saying a G5 2.5 GHz is faster than a P4 3.6 GHz, psttt!
Intel said it, not me.
Pentium-M has 2MB of on-die cache.
Athlon 64 has a cache size of 512kb or 1MB; interestingly 3800+ and 4000+ both run at 2.4Ghz but the latter gains in speed by having a double sized cache... so what if we add more cache?
To effectively compare Pentium-M architecture (by architecture NOT price!) to Athlon 64 we would need a 2MB cache version of it...
If you remember your history, the Pentium-M is based off of the Pentium-III. You know, the same P3 that kicked the crap out of the P4 when it came out, despite the fact that the P3 was topping out around 1.0Ghz and the P4 started at 1.4Ghz.
Unless you mean that the the Pentium M has no hyperthreading, which I suppose is a valid point, as hyperthreading is about all the P4 has going for it right now.
Google cannot tell me which tools are good. An experienced user, can.
Is this a testament to how far the Pentium Mobile architecture has come, or a sad comment on the clockspeed-pushing design of the Pentium 4?
The Pentium III has veen embarassing the Pentium 4 as long as the Pentium 4 has been shipping. This is merely another act in the continuing Greek Tragedy that is the Pentium 4.