Intel Core Solo U1400 vs. Pentium M 750 vs. P4?

Alright, I know it sounds weird...but how does the U1400 (Core Solo ULV) stack up against the 1.86GHz Pentium M and the ancient Northwood 3.0GHz P4?

Is the 1.2GHz U1400 about equal, better, or worse than the other two? By how much?

 

hmm...i'd say the PM 750 is definitely faster than the P4.....not sure about the ULV though.

 

Somewhere I read that there is appr. a 2x between the P4 and the PM. So a 1,86 PM would be definitely faster than a 3.0 P4.

 

Well, I know that PM > P4...but ULV?

Long story short, I've owned notebooks with the P4, PM, Core 2 Duo, and Santa Rosa Core 2 Duo...and I'm wondering where ULV falls into all of this.

 

I'd say the ULV should be about the same or + or - either way of the PM. Why don't you try super pi or something?

 

You can do some interpolation from some results in my Sony G11 review:

SuperPi:
Sony Vaio VGN-G11XN/B (1.33GHz Core Solo U1500) 1m 46s
Fujitsu S6120 (Pentium M 1.6GHz) 2m 29s
Dell Inspiron 2650 (Pentium 4 Mobile 1.6GHz) 4m 05s

wPrime:
Sony Vaio VGN-G11XN/B (1.33GHz Core Solo U1500) 124.581s
Fujitsu S6120 (Pentium M 1.6GHz) 113.705s
Dell Inspiron 2650 (Pentium 4 Mobile 1.6GHz) 231.714s

Unfortunately, the older notebooks wouldn't run the full PCMark05 tests. Other aspects such as RAM amount / speed, HDD speed and GPU will affect the overall usability. My G11 will run Vista but there's a lag if I try to run more than one thing at a time which doesn't occur with a dual core CPU.

John

 

Interesting comparison... why is it that the ULV kills the PM in Super Pi but loses out in wPrime?

Also, is that a Dothan or Banias PM in the S6120?

 

1. Doesn't SuperPi benefit from the bigger cache in the Core Solo?

2. I think the PM is whatever is the older flavour (April 2004 vintage). I have this info to hand:

John

 

HT?!?

1mb L2 that a Banias.

I have a PM 725 1.6GHz 2mb L2 400mhz (December 2004)and thats a Dothan. I'll bench mine with super pi sometime to night

 

Yeah, it's a Banias alright. I've got a 1.4 Banias which is a touch slower. I think the 1.86 Dothan should definitely be approaching if not surpassing the ULV.

 

Just got 112.25s with wPrime.

1.6Ghz 2mb L2 400Mhz

 

Without going into too much detail, in single-threaded applications, my 2.20 GHz Core 2 performs about as fast as a 4.07 GHz Northwood would (theoretically), extropolating from the performance on my 2.66 GHz P4 Northwood. 2.2 * 1.85 = 4.07, so my general figure is 1.85*Core 2 MHz = P4 Northwood MHz.

Assuming a Core Solo ULV doesn't run significantly more efficiently than a Core 2 Standard Voltage, I'd expect a Core Solo ULV at 1.2 GHz to be approximately equivalent to a 2.22 GHz Pentium 4 Northwood. That's leaves more than enough room for error for me to say that I'd confidently go with the P4 Northwood at 3 GHz for speed.

I don't know about the Pentium M, never had experience with them.

 

I attach a couple of results using SiSoftware Sandra on my Sony G11.

If there's demand I can also add results for Sandra's .NET and Java benchmarks, although there is not such a good selection of CPUs in Sandra's results database.

John

 

For completeness, some more Sandra CPU results. Unfortunately, there's no results in the database for the Pentium M in the 1.5 to 2GHz speed range.

John

 

Wow...so if I'm reading this right the ULV chip will sometimes perform better than and worse than either an P-M @ 1.8GHz and a P4 @ 3.0GHz...

 

Not quite so simple. The U1500 does quite well against the others in the SuperPi and wPrime but less well in the Sandra results (some of the U1500 results in Sandra's database are better than what I got yesterday, so they need to be rechecked).

John

 

You will probably find the P-M 750 the best balanced processor between all of these, and probably the best overall performer. The P4 will probably score higher in most catagories than all three, but the P-M will edge it out where it counts most, and won't make your laptop overheat. The P4 was generally a disaster for most notebooks, overheating and causing all sorts of nastiness. Some books were better than others. But the ULV will almost certainly have the worst performance of all three in most cases. Unless it's pure portability and battery life you're after, I'd just go with a P-M 750. You won't be disappointed.