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?"

Comments

Both!

[Theovon]

Intel's finally learning the lesson everyone else knew about 5 years ago. Too little, too late? Or can Centrino save them?

Re:Both!

[0111 1110]

Exactly. The only news here is Intel essentially admitting their mistake with the marketing driven P4. For those who are surprised by these results see previous stories on the subject. See this Doom3 and Far Cry benchmark from the link in the first slashdot article and this extremetech article and this French benchmark. And these are not the only sources. The fact is that on a modern platform the Pentium M is quite competitive with not only a P4 at nearly twice the clock speed, but also with Athlon64 chips at nearly half the power of even a 90 nm Winchester Athlon64 with a max TDP of either 21 or 29 Watts for the older and newer chips respectively.

That's not to say that it is competitive in every domain, but for gaming it is tough to beat. And, yes, many modern games do scale with CPU power.

Not CPU-limited.

[Temporal]

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.

Re:Not CPU-limited.

[gl4ss]

maybe they were using intels graphic chips too? that would explain it.

also. what kind of idiot they got in marketing? the whole comparision is just saying "look, our top of the line desktop chip is shit for gaming!"(not totally true even).

Re:Not CPU-limited.

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad thing is, they were testing using Solitare.

Not enough information

[holymoo]

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?

Not enough info for a statement

[MarcoPon]

> 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!

Drivers

[StevenHenderson]

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 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...

Performance of Pentium 4...

[SharpFang]

...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...

It's a sad comment all right

[Spacejock]

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.

Re:It's a sad comment all right

[sh0dan]

It isn't just an issue of clock speed, but also CPU core voltage. Throttling the clock speed from 2Ghz to 400Mhz can also be combined with a lower CPU voltage. So you are not only running the CPU slower, but also supplying it with a lower voltage.

I don't know about P4, but on AMD systems this allows for the CPU fan to completely stop when the CPU is idle (on desktop systems).

Why are we still married to clock speed?

[Dagny Taggert]

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?

Re:When will they compare Pentium M vs 4?

[illumin8]

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?

Testaments, schmestaments

[The Munger]

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.

Benchmark time

[Zeinfeld]

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.

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.

Re:Size? Weight? Battery Life?

[Slack3r78]

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.

Pentium M will catch up ONLY when FSB goes up

[StandardCell]

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.

Re:Pentium M will catch up ONLY when FSB goes up

[pla]

the front side bus speed is the biggest limiting factor on Pentium M processors.

Thank you... So far, I consider this the only "insightful" comment in this entire topic.

In terms of raw performance, though, Anand and Tom (of which you mention the latter) have both done "real world" tests that don't include the GPU as the bottlenext, and found that, for heavily CPU-bound tasks (such as compression, which also eats memory but mostly just CPU), the Pentium-M (Dothan, in particular) holds its own against both the Prescott (P4) and the Athlon 64. On some tasks any of those three would take the lead, though the Dothan does only take 2nd or 3rd most of the time (but still beats the Athlon XP and the Northwood P4).

For second best, and less than a quarter of the power consumption (less than a tenth when idle) for comparable performance, I fully plan to get a Pentium M as my next desktop upgrade. I care about raw performance, but I also care about my electric bill and about having something that sounds like a jet engine three feet from my head (lower power = less cooling needed = quieter).


PLUS they do the stupid thing here and put in DDR-2 which does little for performance but increases system costs.

Strange opinion... Yes, it increases the system cost a tad, but consider it from two POVs...First, since the Centrino line primarily targets laptops, 2.5V vs 1.8V means significantly lower power consumption (and correspondingly less need for active cooling, making battery life even better). And second - DDR2 picks up where DDR stops, FSB-wise... You could just as well say the original P4s did nothing for performance over the best-of-breed PIIIs, but after three core gens and a doubling of the clock speed, no one would now claim a "modern" PIII will outperform a modern P4.

Re:Pentium M will catch up ONLY when FSB goes up

[BoomerSooner]

Isn't the Pentium-M based off the PIII core? In that case a PIII that is modern as you put it is the Pentium-M which matches or outperforms the P4.

Scientific and Engineering computing

[heffrey]

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?

Pentium M is not 64 bit

[cjc1103]

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.

A benchmark to show that intel might be right.

[TheSunborn]

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

Re:laptop weight

[DingerX]

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.