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
Price based Performance Comparison
To make it easier to digest all of the numbers, we've done a couple of head-to-head comparisons that help paint a more complete picture of the Pentium M's desktop performance.The first, and most important, comparison from a consumer standpoint is the price-based performance comparison - pitting the Pentium M against equivalently-priced desktop CPUs.
At $430 the Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz) is the perfect competitor for the $435 Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz). So, let's see how the two stack up:
| Business/General Use | |||
| Intel Pentium 4 560 | Intel Pentium M 755 | Performance Advantage | |
| Business Winstone 2004 | 21.4 | 24.2 | 13% (Pentium M) |
| SYSMark 2004 - Communication | 137 | 127 | 8% (Pentium 4) |
| SYSMark 2004 - Document Creation | 201 | 187 | 7% (Pentium 4) |
| SYSMark 2004 - Data Analysis | 184 | 108 | 70% (Pentium 4) |
| Microsoft Office XP with SP-2 | 522 | 546 | 4% (Pentium 4) |
| Mozilla 1.4 | 459 | 321 | 30% (Pentium M) |
| ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0 | 547 | 574 | 5% (Pentium 4) |
| Ahead Software Nero Express 6.0.0.3 | 545 | 510 | 6% (Pentium M) |
| WinZip Computing WinZip 8.1 | 412 | 396 | 4% (Pentium M) |
| WinRAR | 479 | 370 | 29% (Pentium 4) |
| Winner | - | - | Pentium 4 |
Under business applications, the Pentium M does fairly well, winning four benchmarks, but the Pentium 4 560 comes ahead with 6 total wins and a higher average win percentage. It is noteworthy to point out the Pentium M's victory in Business Winstone 2004, which is due to its low latency L2 cache, something that the Pentium 4 most definitely lacks.
Multitasking Content Creation
| Multitasking Content Creation | |||
| Intel Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| Content Creation Winstone 2004 | 32.7 | 27.9 | 17% (Pentium 4) |
| SYSMark 2004 - 3D Creation | 231 | 168 | 38% (Pentium 4) |
| SYSMark 2004 - 2D Creation | 288 | 238 | 21% (Pentium 4) |
| SYSMark 2004 - Web Publication | 206 | 160 | 29% (Pentium 4) |
| Mozilla and Windows Media Encoder | 676 | 641 | 5% (Pentium M) |
| Winner | - | - | Pentium 4 |
In multitasking content creation applications, the clear win goes to the Pentium 4 with much larger margins of victory in applications that stress FP performance as well as memory bandwidth.
Video Creation/Photo Editing
| Video Creation/Photo Editing | |||
| Intel Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1 | 342 | 332 | 3% (Pentium M) |
| Adobe Premiere 6.5 | 461 | 418 | 9% (Pentium M) |
| Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator 1.5 | 287 | 411 | 30% (Pentium 4) |
| Winner | - | - | Pentium 4 |
The Pentium M is surprisingly competitive in Adobe Photoshop and Premier, but clearly loses to the Pentium 4 in the VideoWave test. With more and more video editing applications being optimized for the Pentium 4's architecture, at this point, we'd give the win to the Pentium 4 here as well.
Audio/Video Encoding
| Audio/Video Encoding | |||
| Intel Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| MusicMatch Jukebox 7.10 | 484 | 529 | 9% (Pentium 4) |
| DivX Encoding | 55.3 | 36 | 54% (Pentium 4) |
| XviD Encoding | 33.9 | 25.4 | 33% (Pentium 4) |
| Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0 | 2.57 | 1.83 | 40% (Pentium 4) |
| Winner | - | - | Pentium 4 |
Although audio encoding paints the Pentium M in a competitive light, look at any of the video encoding tests and it's obvious that the Pentium M isn't in the same league as the Pentium 4 on a price competitive basis.
Gaming
| Gaming | |||
| Intel Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| Doom 3 | 84.6 | 85 | Tie |
| Halo | 87.5 | 85.2 | 3% (Pentium 4) |
| UT2004 | 59.3 | 55.2 | 7% (Pentium 4) |
| Wolfenstein: ET | 97.2 | 85.5 | 14% (Pentium 4) |
| Winner | - | - | Pentium 4 |
Gaming performance is pretty close, but the Pentium 4 does take the slight lead in some games.
3D Rendering
| 3D Rendering | |||
| Intel Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| Discreet 3dsmax 5.1 (DX) | 268 | 269 | Tie |
| Discreet 3dsmax 5.1 (OGL) | 327 | 350 | 7% (Pentium 4) |
| SPECapc 3dsmax 6 | 1.64 | 1.23 | 33% (Pentium 4) |
| Winner | - | - | Pentium 4 |
As we've already seen, FP performance is not a strongpoint of the Pentium M when compared to higher clocked Pentium 4s - which is why we see the Pentium 4 with such a strong lead in the 3dsmax 6 test.
Professional Applications
| Professional Applications | |||
| Intel Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz) | Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz) | Performance Advantage | |
| SPECviewperf 8 - 3dsmax-03 | 17.04 | 10.73 | 59% (Pentium 4) |
| SPECviewperf 8 - catia-01 | 13.87 | 9.096 | 52% (Pentium 4) |
| SPECviewperf 8 - light-07 | 14.3 | 10.71 | 34% (Pentium 4) |
| SPECviewperf 8 - maya-01 | 13.12 | 15.47 | 18% (Pentium M) |
| SPECviewperf 8 - proe-03 | 16.7 | 10.74 | 55% (Pentium 4) |
| SPECviewperf 8 - sw-01 | 13.09 | 8.593 | 52% (Pentium 4) |
| SPECviewperf 8 - ugs-04 | 15.31 | 10.24 | 50% (Pentium 4) |
| Winner | - | - | Pentium 4 |
The SPECviewperf 8 suite stresses both FP performance and memory bandwidth, so the results here are not surprising at all - the Pentium M isn't a workstation class processor either.
Pentium M vs. Pentium 4 Price Based Comparison Conclusion
At the same price, the Pentium 4 560 is a much better deal than the Pentium M 755, regardless of application suite. Also remember that we're not taking into account motherboard cost in this comparison, which makes the Pentium M 755 about $100 more expensive on the desktop.The Pentium M does produce a lot less heat than the Pentium 4 560, which has to be worth something, right? Well, as we've shown in previous comparisons, the Athlon 64 3500+ is fairly competitive with the Pentium 4 560, and if you get the new 90nm core, produces significantly less heat - making it the better option. You get the performance of the Pentium 4, but with thermal characteristics closer to the Pentium M.
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Jeff7181 - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link
Give the Dothan a speed bump and some dual channel DDR400 and stay out of it's way...MDme - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link
well, now we FINALLY have a comprehensive review of the P-M, it's strengths and weaknesses. While the P-M is good. the A64 is still better.Netopia - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link
Yeah, I was about to say the same as #3.Why did you go to the trouble to list what the AthlonXP system would have in it and then not actually test or reference it anywhere in the article?
I still have a bunch of AXP machines and regularly help others upgrade using XP-M's, so it would be interesting to see these at least included in reviews for a while.
CrystalBay - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link
Hi, I noticed in the testbed an AXP3200/NF2U400 but there are no charts with this setup.Beenthere - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link
It's a pipe dream for those who wish Intel had their act together. It's already confirmed M don't scale well and is not effective for HD computing. It's performance is really some place between Sempron and A64 but certainly not a suitable competitor to A64 nor FX. Just another Hail Mary for a defunct Intel.coldpower27 - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link
Hmm, an interesting review on the Pentium M to say the least. Though are 2-2-2-10 timings for the Pentium M the best for this architecture???0ldman79 - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
It's interesting coming back and reading this after it's all settled, Core 2 seemed to be an evolution of the Pentium M line.Intel did hang the Netburst architecture up, though they added a lot of Netburst's integer design to Core 2 while designing Nehalem. AMD apparently believed that Intel was going to stick with Netburst and designed the FX line, while Intel went back to their earlier designs and lowered the clock speed, massively increased the IPC and parallelism and out-Phenom'ed the Phenom with Nehalem.
Back then Intel believed that Dennard scaling would continue and they'd have 10GHz chips, turns out wider and slower is better.