• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Pentium M

Z

zeitgeist

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 30, 2001
Messages
1,509
Can someone tell me why the Pentium M chips are so much better then their desktop counterparts? Are they faster? More efficient?
 
Pentium M's are based on the Banias and Dothan cores. They are not to be confused with Pentium 4 M. The low power version of the desktop chip. The Pentium M is based on the P6 microarchitecture which was the Pentium Pro/II/III core. In this case it's a low power higher clocked version of the P6 with a cache design similar to that of the Pentium 4's. They are in socket 479 form factor and right now use the i855 chipset. Which unfortunatley doesn't support an 800MHz FSB or even DDR400. Also it still uses a single channel memory interface.

As tests have shown the platforms specifications have hardly hurt it's performance. When overclocked to 2.8GHz the chip is very competative with Pentium 4's close to 4GHz and even comparable to the Athlon 3800+ and 4000+ chips in game performance.

They are also on a 533MHz FSB/ They are faster per clock cycle as they have a shorter pipeline. 10 stages like the Athlon and the Pentium III. A 2.0GHz Pentium M is roughly as fast as a Pentium 4 3.0GHz.

If Intel would add 1066FSB support to the chips, increase the clock speed past 2.2GHz and give it dual channel support. The thing would totally kick ass. Dual core CPU's based on this design are planned. But not for some time. The first round of dual core CPU's will be Prescott based.

Intel just needs to put the Pentium M into production as a desktop chip.
 
Sir-Fragalot said:
Pentium M's are based on the Banias and Dothan cores. They are not to be confused with Pentium 4 M. The low power version of the desktop chip. The Pentium M is based on the P6 microarchitecture which was the Pentium Pro/II/III core. In this case it's a low power higher clocked version of the P6 with a cache design similar to that of the Pentium 4's. They are in socket 479 form factor and right now use the i855 chipset. Which unfortunatley doesn't support an 800MHz FSB or even DDR400. Also it still uses a single channel memory interface.

As tests have shown the platforms specifications have hardly hurt it's performance. When overclocked to 2.8GHz the chip is very competative with Pentium 4's close to 4GHz and even comparable to the Athlon 3800+ and 4000+ chips in game performance.

They are also on a 533MHz FSB/ They are faster per clock cycle as they have a shorter pipeline. 10 stages like the Athlon and the Pentium III. A 2.0GHz Pentium M is roughly as fast as a Pentium 4 3.0GHz.

If Intel would add 1066FSB support to the chips, increase the clock speed past 2.2GHz and give it dual channel support. The thing would totally kick ass. Dual core CPU's based on this design are planned. But not for some time. The first round of dual core CPU's will be Prescott based.

Intel just needs to put the Pentium M into production as a desktop chip.
Click to expand...



actually...
0. The Pentium-M's aren't based on Dothan and Banias. They're comprised of the Banias (.13 micron; 1mb L2) and Dothan (.09 micron, 2mb L2) cores. Maybe based was just poor wording? They're based on a hybrid of the P3 architecture and P4 architectures...as well as the Timna. link
1. the Banias and Dothan cores are 400FSB. They support a max of PC-2700/533FSB RAM(at least, I've seen no motherboards that ship with higher than PC-2700.)
2. the new cores due out next year are 533FSB.
 
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=dothandesktop&page=1

Mixed results, they said. It's not optimized for desktop use, but if it were, it would kick ass. Read Sir-Frag's post and imagine if it had a decent chipset and all the goodies to go along with it.

Intel made the P4 to scale high in Mhz (or so they had hoped) so the average person would see more Mhz and would think it was better than whatever AMD had to offer. Mhz doesn't necessarily mean better performance. The Dothan is the opposite of that philosophy and consequently, can do more work per cycle. But the Dothan was designed as a mobile chip and was meant to use less power. If Intel made a desktop version and wasn't so concerned about power consumption, it would be an awesome CPU.
 
NecessaryEvil said:
actually...
0. The Pentium-M's aren't based on Dothan and Banias. They're comprised of the Banias (.13 micron; 1mb L2) and Dothan (.09 micron, 2mb L2) cores. Maybe based was just poor wording? They're based on a hybrid of the P3 architecture and P4 architectures...as well as the Timna. link
1. the Banias and Dothan cores are 400FSB. They support a max of PC-2700/533FSB RAM(at least, I've seen no motherboards that ship with higher than PC-2700.)
2. the new cores due out next year are 533FSB.
Click to expand...

Yeah the differences between Banias and Dothan were not covered by my post. I did word that poorly. I thought they were 533FSB. Or at least Dothan was.
 
why do Pentium M's rock?
IPC, baby, something Intel should have done long ago.
 
ScHpAnKy said:
why do Pentium M's rock?
IPC, baby, something Intel should have done long ago.
Click to expand...

Well back in the Pentium III days they did. They just couldn't at that time get the clock speeds up on that design. So they decided for marketing reasons to go with a cpu that would just clock insanely high. They called it Pentium 4. Now that they are at the limits of scalable speeds on them, they have to go back to that more effecient design.
 
Sir-Fragalot said:
Yeah the differences between Banias and Dothan were not covered by my post. I did word that poorly. I thought they were 533FSB. Or at least Dothan was.
Click to expand...

Dothan was supposed to be a 533 FSB part, it was also supposed to hit about 2.4ghz,
But they had trouble meeting those requirments and staying in their thermal envolope.
So they were a little more conservative and just made it a modest clock speed bump, and kept the power dissipation down.
 
FreiDOg said:
Dothan was supposed to be a 533 FSB part, it was also supposed to hit about 2.4ghz,
But they had trouble meeting those requirments and staying in their thermal envolope.
So they were a little more conservative and just made it a modest clock speed bump, and kept the power dissipation down.
Click to expand...

Ahh. I know that the Dothan will transition to those in the near future. But probably not until a version of the i915 chipset can be made for the mobil platforms.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top