Pentium M beats Pentium 4, AthlonXP at finding aliens

THE PENTIUM M appears to be such a fantastic chip that it knocks the socks off the best Intel can offer with Pentium 4 technology and AMD with an XP 3000+.

That's the surprising conclusion of two sets of figures, one by individuals attempting SETI@home work cycles using the Pentium M and the other on Intel's own web site.

A posting on ALT.SCI.SETI, and using a 1.6GHz Pentium M, which is the chip at the heart of the Centrino, appears to indicate that a little Centrino machine can crunch at high, high speed, trashing the performance of Pentium 4s and Athlon XPs.

As one person in the thread says: "Makes me wonder why they didn't make a desktop version. Just imagine a 3000MHz Centrino".

Those threads start here.

But there's also evidence on Intel's site that the Pentium M is a superduper microprocessor, which perhaps ought to make it into the League of Superchips.

That's contained in a PDF at Intel's site, which you can find here

On page 14 of that document, Intel says: "MobileMark 2002 is used to evaluate notebook PC user experience by measuring both performance and battery life at the same time on the same workload. MobileMark 2002 is a tool that measures notebook PC performance on popular business-oriented applications in the Microsoft Windows operating environment. The productivity usage model provides computations representing today's business users using popular office productivity and content creation applications. This usage model report a performance score and a battery life score."

Essentially, Intel is looking at applications including Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1, Macromedia Flash 5.0, McAfee VirusScan 5.13, Microsoft Excel 2002, Outlook 2002, PowerPoint 2002, Word 2002, Netscape Communicator 6.0, and WinZip 8.0".

On the next page are two comparison charts, in which the megahertz-less Pentium M chip is compared to Pentium 4M at 2.4GHz.

That shows that a 1.6GHz Centrino is around 15% faster than the Pentium 4M. And its battery life is far better than the Pentium III-M and the Pentium 4.

In fact, Intel showed this test at its February developer forum, as we wrote here. Comparisons are odious but then it appeared that the Pentium 4M was pretty power-hog odious too.

All of this just makes us think that our crusade to put the Pentium M into desktops - even if Intel will never do it - indeed has legs. µ

See Also
Intel confirms clock speed irrelevant for notebooks
Crusade starts for Pentium Ms in desktops
Pentium M crusade starts to take off
Intel's Centrino: is the strategy paying off?
Pentium M makes it to desktop