Intel's Centrino CPU (Pentium-M): Revolutionizing the Mobile World
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 12, 2003 6:10 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
General Usage Performance
Although not as performance-critical as content creation applications, it is the set of every day applications like Office and other general usage programs that the majority of users find themselves interacting with the most.
We start with VeriTest's Business Winstone 2002:
The Business Winstone tests are "market-centered" tests. Business applications are the popular applications employed by most users every day.
Five Microsoft Office 2002 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word)
Microsoft Project 2000
Lotus Notes
WinZip 8.0
Norton AntiVirus
Netscape Communicator
|
27.0
25.2
24.8Integer applications are very branch intensive and thus the Pentium-M's shorter pipeline and well balanced branch predictor (balanced for the architecture) give the 1.6GHz Pentium-M the title of the fastest mobile processor in Business Winstone 2002. Not only can the Pentium-M outperform the fastest Pentium 4, but it also comes out ahead of the 2.66GHz Pentium 4, even despite its higher speed FSB (533MHz vs. 400MHz).
|
146We close off with some more office performance scores; this time around, the Pentium-M comes in neck and neck with the 2.66GHz Pentium 4 - a desktop CPU.
Because of the difficulty in putting together a good desktop vs. mobile graphics comparison, we've limited our performance tests here to 2D-only. For gaming performance of the Pentium-M, take a look at our Centrino Notebook Roundup.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
8 Comments
View All Comments
zigCorsair - Wednesday, July 14, 2004 - link
I thought it was a very informative article. Of course, I'll be upset if it's biased, but being a master's student in CS, many of the exact details I was looking for were in here, and for that I say thank you.Zebo - Monday, May 10, 2004 - link
I don't see whats so impressive. An athlon mobile 2600/2800 xp 35W version, which runs ~2000Mhz will kill these. To little to late.Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
how the hell could this be a balanced and informative article when in their own analysis they ignored their own data?There is no mention of the anamolous nature of the BAPCO test..absolutely NOTHING...
Its enough for me to question the competency of this site...and even to the point where I suspect that certain unethical compromises have been made.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
Yeah, I agree with Sprockkets... same reason Athlon XP loses to the P4 in this benchmark... someone was trying to make the P4 look better, and everything else look worse. Now all the sudden, this new great CPU is getting it's but kicked because of all the P4 optimizations (and probably non-P4 deoptomizations).sprockkets - Tuesday, September 9, 2003 - link
I wonder why the P4 trashes the PM on Content Creation Performance and nothing else? Maybe it's the stupid skewing toward the P4. Why else would it lose here and kick butt everywhere else? www.theinquirer.net has an article which brought this to readers attention.Anonymous User - Thursday, August 21, 2003 - link
"Without a trace cache, the design team was forced to develop a more accurate branch predictor unit for the Banias core. Although beyond the scope of this article, Banias was outfitted with a branch predictor significantly superior to what was in the Pentium III. The end result was a reduction of mispredicted branches by around 20%."Wouldn't he mean that the branch predictor was superior to the P4?
Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 19, 2003 - link
looks goodAnonymous User - Friday, August 8, 2003 - link
An outstanding well balanced article, after this read I feel I really know about Centrino. Thanks