Intel's Pentium M on the Desktop - A Viable Alternative?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 7, 2005 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Clock Speed based Performance Comparison
While the price-based performance comparison is the more practical comparison, a comparison based on clock speed is quite possibly the more interesting. We took an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Socket-939, 2.0GHz) and pitted it against our 2.0GHz Pentium M 755 to see how efficient Intel's mobile core happens to be.| Business/General Use | |||
| AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| Business Winstone 2004 | 22.1 | 24.2 | 10% (Pentium M) |
| SYSMark 2004 - Communication | 134 | 127 | 6% (Athlon 64) |
| SYSMark 2004 - Document Creation | 169 | 187 | 11% (Pentium M) |
| SYSMark 2004 - Data Analysis | 133 | 108 | 23% (Athlon 64) |
| Microsoft Office XP with SP-2 | 544 | 546 | Tie |
| Mozilla 1.4 | 360 | 321 | 11% (Pentium M) |
| ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0 | 553 | 574 | 4% (Athlon 64) |
| Ahead Software Nero Express 6.0.0.3 | 497 | 510 | 3% (Athlon 64) |
| WinZip Computing WinZip 8.1 | 448 | 396 | 12% (Pentium M) |
| WinRAR | 566 | 370 | 53% (Athlon 64) |
| Winner | - | - | AMD Athlon 64 3200+ |
The Pentium M is extremely competitive with the Athlon 64 in our business/general use tests, even outperforming it in four of the benchmarks. However, in tests where the Pentium M's 2MB L2 cache isn't enough, the Athlon 64 pulls ahead - such as the Data Analysis SYSMark 2004 test and the WinRAR test.
Multitasking Content Creation
| Multitasking Content Creation | |||
| AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| Content Creation Winstone 2004 | 30.9 | 27.9 | 11% (Athlon 64) |
| SYSMark 2004 - 3D Creation | 174 | 168 | 4% (Athlon 64) |
| SYSMark 2004 - 2D Creation | 214 | 238 | 11% (Pentium M) |
| SYSMark 2004 - Web Publication | 161 | 160 | Tie |
| Mozilla and Windows Media Encoder | 685 | 641 | 6% (Pentium M) |
| Winner | - | - | Tie |
Surprisingly enough, the Athlon 64 and the Pentium M 755 give us a tie here. Content creation applications tend to be more memory bandwidth sensitive than not, so we were a bit surprised to see that the Pentium M did so well here, but it appears that the low latency L2 cache is able to make up for its lack of memory bandwidth. To AMD's credit, as applications increase in size, the Pentium M wouldn't be able to compete as well, but for present day applications, it's interesting to see the Pentium M do so well without the aid of AMD's on-die memory controller.
Video Creation/Photo Editing
| Video Creation/Photo Editing | |||
| AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1 | 364 | 332 | 8% (Pentium M) |
| Adobe Premiere 6.5 | 405 | 418 | 3% (Athlon 64) |
| Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator 1.5 | 349 | 411 | 15% (Athlon 64) |
| Winner | - | - | AMD Athlon 64 3200+ |
The race is fairly close here, but AMD pulls away in the two video editing tests.
Audio/Video Encoding
| Audio/Video Encoding | |||
| AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| MusicMatch Jukebox 7.10 | 540 | 529 | 2% (Pentium M) |
| DivX Encoding | 40.8 | 36 | 13% (Athlon 64) |
| XviD Encoding | 27.8 | 25.4 | 10% (Athlon 64) |
| Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0 | 1.85 | 1.83 | Tie |
| Winner | - | - | AMD Athlon 64 3200+ |
The Pentium 4 completely blew the Pentium M away in the video encoding tests and while the Athlon 64 also manages to outperform it, the margin of victory isn't nearly as great. With a faster memory bus, it is possible that the Pentium M could significantly lessen the gap. Regardless, the win still goes to the Athlon 64.
Gaming
| Gaming | |||
| AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| Doom 3 | 90.3 | 85 | 6% (Athlon 64) |
| Halo | 87 | 85.2 | 2% (Athlon 64) |
| UT2004 | 58.7 | 55.2 | 6% (Athlon 64) |
| Wolfenstein: ET | 93.1 | 85.5 | 9% (Athlon 64) |
| Winner | - | - | AMD Athlon 64 3200+ |
Gaming performance is extremely close, but AMD takes the slight lead over the Pentium M.
3D Rendering
| 3D Rendering | |||
| AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| Discreet 3dsmax 5.1 (DX) | 278 | 269 | 3% (Pentium M) |
| Discreet 3dsmax 5.1 (OGL) | 344 | 350 | 2% (Pentium M) |
| SPECapc 3dsmax 6 | 1.28 | 1.23 | 4% (Athlon 64) |
| Winner | - | - | Tie |
3D Rendering performance is even closer between these two, leaving us with a tie between the Athlon 64 and the Pentium M at the same clock speed.
Professional Applications
| Professional Applications | |||
| AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| SPECviewperf 8 - 3dsmax-03 | 15.47 | 10.73 | 44% (Athlon 64) |
| SPECviewperf 8 - catia-01 | 12.06/strong> | 9.096 | 33% (Athlon 64) |
| SPECviewperf 8 - light-07 | 12.08 | 10.71 | 13% (Athlon 64) |
| SPECviewperf 8 - maya-01 | 15.69 | 15.47 | Tie |
| SPECviewperf 8 - proe-03 | 15.22 | 10.74 | 42% (Athlon 64) |
| SPECviewperf 8 - sw-01 | 12.24 | 8.593 | 42% (Athlon 64) |
| SPECviewperf 8 - ugs-04 | 13.99 | 10.24 | 37% (Athlon 64) |
| Winner | - | - | AMD Athlon 64 3200+ |
The SPECviewperf 8 suite goes to AMD, as the Athlon 64 completely dominates the Pentium M, clock for clock, in these very memory bandwidth, latency and FP intensive tests.
Pentium M vs. Athlon 64 Clock Speed Based Comparison Conclusion
While the Athlon 64 3200+ pulled away with the win in most of our test suites (tying twice), the Pentium M 755 put up a very hard fight. Given how strongly the Pentium M competes with the Athlon 64 on a clock for clock basis, the obvious answer would be to use the Pentium M to compete with AMD instead of the Pentium 4, right?Wrong. The fundamental issue is that although the Pentium M is surprisingly competitive with the Athlon 64 on a clock for clock basis, the Pentium M's architecture can't scale to the same clock speeds that the Athlon 64 can. The fact of the matter is that while the Pentium M will hit 2.26GHz by the end of 2005, the Athlon 64 will be on its way to 3.0GHz and beyond. It's the same argument that was present during the Pentium III vs. Pentium 4 transition period, and we all know the result of that transition.
The Pentium M's astounding successes against the Athlon 64, despite the lack of an on-die memory controller and only a single channel DDR333 memory bus, are without a doubt due to its 10 cycle L2 cache. We've seen how much a reduction in memory latency can do for performance - the Athlon 64 is a living, breathing example of that. But an even greater reduction in L2 cache latency is even more powerful under the right circumstances.
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bob661 - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
The only problem with this chip is that the marketing is oriented towards the mobile market and therefore not a direct competitor to the A64. It would be nice if it was. It might bring some cats out of the bag on the AMD side. Competition in the marketplace is good for us all.jvrobert - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
Really, AMDroids, get a grip. You're all excited because the AMD chips beat a mobile processor pretty handily, and because you are making some silly assumption that the Pentium-M in its current form is Intel's "last chance".First, Intel doesn't need a last chance. They make enough money to make AMD look like a Mexico City taco stand. So enough of those delusions of grandeur.
But on a technical front, if Intel ramps the clockspeed up to the 2.8 range (easy), and releases a desktop class chipset for the Pentium M it would match or exceed any current chip. And these are _basic_ steps. What if they made more improvements?
jvrobert - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
bob661 - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
#45You are a rock. The point of the article was to compare the P-M to desktop CPU's because most of us here wanted to know it will perform. And you know what? It performed very nicely.
classy - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
I just can't help but to laugh at some folks. Its a nice chip but clearly not in the A64 ballpark. Its that simple. As far as the 2.8 oc, that was only accomplished in one reveiw. All the reviews show the same thing you have oc so it can it compete. What's interesting though is most of these Intel fanboys don't want to see a comparison of an oc'ed A64 vs a Dothan. Smoke city :)FrostAWOL - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
IF the Pentium-M and P4 are electrically incompatible then someone please explain this:HP Blade system Pentium-M with Serverworks GC-SL chipset
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/prolian...
FrostAWOL
jae63 - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
Great review & of interest to those of us with HTPCs. Too bad the price point is so steep.One minor correction on page 11:
"The Pentium M does a bit better in the document creation tests, as they are mostly using applications that will fit within the CPU's cache. However, the introduction of a voice recognition program into the test stresses the Pentium M's floating point performance, which does hamper its abilities here."
Actually NaturallySpeaking uses almost no floating point but is very memory intensive. The performance hit that you are seeing is because it uses a lot of memory bandwidth and its dataset doesn't fit in the L2 cache.
Here's some support for my statement, by the main architect of NaturallySpeaking, Joel Gould:
http://tinyurl.com/6s4mh
segagenesis - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
#43 - I think you have the right idea here. This processor is not meant to be performance busting but rather a low energy alternative to current heat factories present inside every P4 machine. I would love to have this in a HTPC machine myself but the cost is still too damn high. Hopefully higher production will bring the cost down.Aileur - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
I guess the pentium M isnt ready (yet) for a full featured gaming machine, but with that kind of power, passively cooled, it would make for one hell of an htpc.PrinceGaz - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
#45- It was not an unfair review, on the contrary it seemed very well done. The reason the P-M was compared with fast P4 and A64's is because they cost about the same.Maybe someone else buys your computers for you, but most of us here have to spend our own money on them so cost is the best way to decide what to compare it with.