Pentium M Beats Athlon 64 Fx

[bangbuathong]

With a simple adapter, Intel's Pentium M processor can be used on veteran mainboards based on the i865 and i875 chipsets. Would you believe that this unorthodox combination proves to be so fast that it beats even the Athlon 64 FX and the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition?!

read it hereat toms hardware

[astral]

That sounds rather doubtful without the memory and IO bandwidth to support the faster processor?

[bangbuathong]

That sounds rather doubtful without the memory and IO bandwidth to support the faster processor?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

read the article thoroughly,

With the help of a simple socket adapter card and a BIOS upgrade, certain mainboards using Intel's 865/875 chipsets can be upgraded to use a Pentium M instead of a Pentium 4. Such a system offers up-to-date performance paired with low power requirements.

Additionally, we were able to raise the FSB from 133 to 160 MHz without any trouble at all. The result was that our 2.13GHz Pentium M 770 ended up running at 2.56 GHz! At this clock speed, our two year old platform was able to beat the processor heavyweights Athlon 64 FX and Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition in all 3D games!

[h90]

Sounds crazy, but seems to be true. very interesting results.

That sounds rather doubtful without the memory and IO bandwidth to support the faster processor?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

read the article thoroughly,

With the help of a simple socket adapter card and a BIOS upgrade, certain mainboards using Intel's 865/875 chipsets can be upgraded to use a Pentium M instead of a Pentium 4. Such a system offers up-to-date performance paired with low power requirements.

Additionally, we were able to raise the FSB from 133 to 160 MHz without any trouble at all. The result was that our 2.13GHz Pentium M 770 ended up running at 2.56 GHz! At this clock speed, our two year old platform was able to beat the processor heavyweights Athlon 64 FX and Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition in all 3D games!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[The Coder]

This is the most amazing discovery I have seen in a long while. It has been known the Pentium M is very good clock for clock but it always runs at a much slower clock with slower components for power consumption reasons. To see it outperform the big boys when shimmed into a desktop role is amazing. Why in the world is Intel manufacturing Prescotts, Celerons, Extreme Editions, etc??? It looks like at least some of these product lines could be obsoleted in favor of a Pentium M on the desktop. What's the catch? Intel definitely has some explaining to do here.

[Thetyim]

VIA are about to launch a cpu that uses the 479 Pentium M socket.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23271

No-one has mentioned the cost of an 'M' yet

[Firefoxx]

Well, desktop mainboards that can use the Pentium M directly have been available for some time. It was well known that, with their different architecture, they could beat normal desktop CPUs (prescotts) at most things, even though they're running at half the clock speed. Now this was with a chipset for the Pentium M, which meant that things like DDR were not used, so it's obvious that with the faster bus of the desktop chipsets, the Pentium M would be able to perform even better.

However, there are a few gotchas. The Pentium M lacks some of the features available to the desktop Pentiums, like HyperThreading, dual core, SSE performance, etc. This means that they were still lacking in multiprocessing or video intensive tasks. They also aren't that cheap or easy to find (at least here, in the US go to Newegg). On the other hand, they run much cooler than prescotts, and so your cooling solution can be much quieter.

[Mr_Happy]

Pentium M is based on a PIII which is alot better than p4 design but does not hold a candle to the A64 dual cores... 27,000 sandra cpu scores

[MikeWill]

It seems tho' that the luck of 64-bit ability of Pentium M is the major drawback. The dual core and other aspects mentioned by Firefoxx is another story.