pentium m/ pentium 4 - which is faster?

I randomly decided to go on some other notebook forum and i noticed ppl saying that pentium Ms are faster than pentium 4s!

Is this true? considering p4s have faster front side busses etc

 

Yes. That's right. The early Pentium Ms for example, at 1.6GHz, were faster than 2.66GHz Pentium 4s in notebooks, while running different applications.

 

Clock for clock, a Pentium M will vastly outperform a Pentium 4, even though it has a slower FSB. Part of it is the massive L2 cache, but the architecture is also a lot more efficient with a shorter pipeline.

 

ah i see. I don't know much about CPUs. Well I know enough now.

So what is the equivalent for a 2ghz centrino 760 for Pentium 4?

 

Most people say to get a P4 clock speed equivalent, you multiply by 1.7. So an equivalent P4 would be 3.4GHz.

 

l think the rule of thumb is take the speed of your pentium M; and double it.

Don't think that you have a 4.0Ghz P4 on your hands because i'm not sure.

 

well my P4 3.2GHz 533FSB HT CPU, is no better than a 1.86GHz Sonoma, actually it is a bit slower (in general of course, there are still very few things where a p4 is better.

 

No it's not double, it is around 1.6 - 1.7 x conversion scale

 

Yes, this is correct.

 

wow. And only a few months ago I wanted a pentium 4 laptop!

now I know the truth

 

Ahaha... at first people thought P4s in notebooks were great, because you had portable desktop power... But P4s use up a ton of energy and make a lot of heat, making them a horrible choice for a laptop.

And after the Pentium M... or the AMD 64 even, there really was no good reason to have a P4 in a notebook.

 

For Intel option their was at first ... price. P4s were cheap compared to PMs when they first came out. That is why they survived for a while in the mobile world, and P4-M versions were released even after PM was out.

 

The Pentium M is basically a low voltage modified Pentium III. Normally you would think that a Pentium 4 would be faster than a chip based on their older design (Pentium M) but basically the Pentium 4 was complete hype and was simply an attempt by Intel to market a HIGHER Clock speed processor to dupe the public into thinking that since the Pentium 4 has a higher clock speed, then it must be faster.

So eventhough it is based on older technology, the Pentium M is a better performing processor.

The Best processors however are based on AMD's Athlon 64 designs because they were designed from the ground up to be very powerful, efficient, support 64bits and 32bits, and be able to be multicore chips without losing performance.

Below is a link to some multicore Pentium 4's versus some Multicore Opterons.
http://www.aceshardware.com/SPECmine...t=3800&o=0&o=1

I know that this is a server chip comparison but it's a good benchmark to look at nonetheless and does have some direct implications to the Core Duo. As you can see, as the cores move up from 1 to 4 cores the performance of the Pentium designs lag considerably behind the Opterons. What this benchmark reveals is the paramount importance of having an on die memory controller when moving from 1 to 2 and to 4 cores. As more cores are introduced to a system, the FSB of the Pentium systems becomes a huge bottleneck sapping the advantages of having the additional cores in the first place.

The Core Duo suffers from this same design strategy of the Pentium 4 and Pentium D due to its lack of an on die memory controller as well. An example of the effect of not having the on die memory controller is evidenced by a Dual Core Opteron clocked at 2200mhz beating the 4 cores of 2 Pentium 4 Xeons with each core clocked at 3000mhz!

In contrast, the Turion design includes an on die memory controller which runs at the ultra-fast clock speed of the processor like the Opterons and can scale from 1 to 2 and then to 4 cores with almost perfect efficiency without the FSB becoming a bottleneck, even if the FSB and Memory are clocked at lower rates. The OnDie memory controller is that important and you only get it with Turions!!

And now with AMD's new AM2 socket for laptops soon to be released (May 2006), users may be able to for the first time in history upgrade the cpu from 1 to 2 and even to a 4 core Turion processor, all on the same laptop. And these are extra cores that will ramp perfectly in performance just like those Opterons did in that Benchmark from Aceshardware. This is Truly Amazing stuff and Very Exciting!!!

Here are some benchmarks of the Turion chips versus the Pentium M.
http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/pentiumm-vs-turion64/index.x?pg=13
Here's a link that shows that similar clock speed Pentium M laptops cost on average $200 more than Turion based laptops. You save on the Processor and on the motherboard.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article300-page2.html

 

You've cross-posted yet again:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=43058

In addition, the P-M was based off of the P3 - not a "modified version" - the P-M was designed from the ground up to be a notebook CPU, not a desktop/server chip. In notebooks, the best performing CPUs are NOT of AMD's design - they are of Intel's design, namely the Core Duo. In DESKTOPS, CPUs of AMD's design are better than Intel's CPUs, not in notebooks. In addition, 64-bit computing will not be a necessary for at least another 3-5 years, so there is no need to worry if your CPU now is 64-bit or not (unless you need 64-bit technology now for some reason)

 

There was an article at Tom's hardware, I believe, sorry don't have link, that did a test to compare the two. Pentium-M is superior in architecture supposedly and is supposedly based more on the Pentium III than the Pentium 4.

Mhz for mhz, Pentium-M is more powerful, but you see that the Pentium 4's have greater bus speeds and stuff like that.

If you do a search for Pentium-M overclocks they have desktop motherboards with the 915 chipset with Pentium-M's overclocked like hell that beat almost all Pentium 4's.

Cheers,
Mike