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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fitten - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
Also, it's interesting that there are many benchmarks chosen which are known to stress the weaknesses of the Pentium-M... not that it isn't interesting information. For example, there seems to be a whole lot of FPU intensive benchmarks (around 15 or so, all of which the Pentium-M should lose handily - known before they are even run) so kind of just hammering the point home I guess.Anyway, the Dothans held up pretty well from what I can see... Most of the time (except for the notable FPU intensive and memory bandwidth intensive benchmarks), the Dothan compares quite well with Athlon64s of the same clock speed that have the advantage of dual channel memory.
fitten - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
The other interesting thing about the Athlon64 vs. Dothan comparison is that even with dual channel memory bandwidth on the Athlon64's side, the single channel memory bandwidth of the Dothan still keeps it very close in many of the benchmarks and can even beat the dual channel Athlon64s at 400MHz higher clock in some.Anyway, the Pentium-M family is a good start. Some tweaking here and there (improved FPU with better FPU performance and maybe another FPU execution unit, improved memory subsystem to make good use of dual channel) and it will be at least as good as the Athlon64s across the board.
I own three Athlon64 desktops, two AthlonXP desktops, and two Pentium-M laptops and the laptops are by no means "slow" at doing work.
KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
teutonicknight: We purposely don't change our test platform too often. Even though we are using a slightly older version of Premiere, it is the same version we have used in our other processor analyses.Hope that helps,
Kristopher
kmmatney - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
There's also a Celeron version that would have been intersting to review. The small L2 cache should hurt the performance, though. I think the celeron version using something like 7 Watts. It would make no sense to put a celeron-M in such an expensive motherboard, though.Slaimus - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
I think this indirectly shows how AMD needs to update its caching architecture on the K8. They basically carried over the K7 caches, which is just too slow when paired with its memory controller. Instead of being as large as possible (as evidenced by the exclusive caches) at the expense of latency, the K8 needs faster caches. The memory bandwith of L2 vs system memory is only about 2 to 1 on the K8, which is to say the L2 cache is not helping the system memory much.sandorski - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link
I think the Pentium M mythos can now be laid to rest.mjz5 - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link
to #29:your 2800 is the 754 pin.
the 3000+ reviewed is the 939 pin which is 1.8. the 3000+ for the 754 is 2.0 ghz
kristof007 - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link
I don't know if anyone else noticed but the charts are a bit off. My A64 2800+ is running at a stock 1.8 ghz .. while in the review the A64 3000+ is running at 1.8 ... weird!knitecrow - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link
#251) Intel and AMD measure TDP differently... and TDP is not the same as actual power dissipation. The actual dissipation of 90nm A64 is pretty darn good.
2) A microprocessor is not made of Lego... you can't rearrange/tweak parts to make it faster. It takes a lot of time, energy and talent to make changes -- even then it may not work for the best. Prescott anyone?
Frankly I’ve been waiting for a good review of P-M's actual performance. I really don't trust those "other" sites.
k00kie - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link