Re: Pentium M is actually quite good. (Was: Re: Laptop_Mode was[Re: [OT] Ext3 Speed Issues? (Was: Re: [gentoo-user] file system corrupted)])

[Charles Pittman]

On Apr 12, 2005 12:09 AM, Peter Gordon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Jerry McBride wrote:
> Because I KNOW it works on AMD mobile chips, first hand. I've never even
> looked at Intel mobile processors.... Probably never will...

Don't disregard the Pentium M so quickly. The Pentium4 is a _horrible_
architecture: Intel wanted a CPU that could be clocked _very_ fast (I think the
current top speed is ~3.4 GHz). However, the P4 can't really do a lot per cycle.
The Pentium M[1] though..wow. That's actually a really great chip. They (Intel)
took the awesomeness of the Pentium3 family, added the cool SSE stuff from the
P4, gave it a lot of on-die cache (the Dothan core has 2 MB L2 cache), increased
the instruction pipline, and also made it consume a _lot_ less power. In fact,
when the P4 came out originally I honestly thought that it would be the end of
Intel; then they started producing their "Centrino"[2] laptop chipset (Pentium M
with Intel mobile chipset and integrated Intel PRO/Wireless). It consumes very
little power but it can perform really well. In fact, My brother gave me a good
rule-of-thumb about this when he was explaining it to me a while back: Add 1 GHz
or so and that's the equivalently rated P4. For example, a 1.5 GHz Pentium M
will likely perform just as well, if not better, then a ~2.5 GHz Pentium 4.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_M
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino

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Do all Pentium M processors have integrated wireless? I guess that would explain the wireless on/off button on the left-had side of my laptop (which I can't use, because no program recognizes any of those hotkeys).