Linux and the Desktop Pentium M: Uncommon Performance
by Kristopher Kubicki on December 24, 2004 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Rendering Benchmarks
Below, we use Mental Ray 3.3.1 to render a particularly memory and CPU intensive benchmark scene (which you can download here). Below, you can see how the 32-bit binaries perform on the 32-bit versions of SuSE 9.1 Pro.
POV-Ray 3.6.1 was compiled from source using GCC 3.4.1.
We also took the same POV-Ray benchmark and ran it against the Pentium M clocked at speeds from 1.6GHz to 2.4GHz.
As you can see, the Pentium M can deal some healthy performance even with a simple 300MHz bump in clock speed (which is so easy to do on Pentium M's, it seems almost criminal). Although we have articles from Wes and Anand that will specifically deal with overclocking the Dothan, we should mention some of the excellent overclocking experiences that we had with the chip. Let's just keep our fingers crossed and hope that Intel doesn't decide to start locking these CPUs.
We added Apple's Shake 3.5c to our benchmarks during the Sun w2100z review, and we retested some of our older processors for these tests. You may download our batch Shake test file from Lindsay Adams here. The render time of all ten frames are summed and listed as the total render time for this analysis.
Dothan takes one of its first real dives here, and unfortunately not its last either.
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KristopherKubicki - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
phaxmohdem: these were just linux tests, but i do believe we have all of those render benchmarks coming up in the Windows analysis.Kristopher
overclockingoodness - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
#44: The results could be better on the Windows platform, as stated in the conclusion.sprockkets - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
If you want to see the clock speed dynamically adjusted just roll your mouse over the kpowersave daemon running in the tray (at least it works for me under SuSE 9.2). Even my little Via C3 800mhz system will scale from 399 to 800mhz depending on load. It may even work in 9.1 (the part I couldn't enable was the suspend options). Hell, SuSE even can make my Hitachi Desktar drive go quiet to performance mode right in the OS!formulav8 - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
As this article shows, alot of people way overhyped this chip. Yes its not bad, but not the P4 Killer that alot of people claimed.It is interesting but it doesn't look like Intel will make a Desktop chip based on this cpu yet in the near future. Dual cores would be very interesting though.
JAson
phaxmohdem - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
This chip seems to be a god-send for the corporate IT directors needing machines for their monkeys to do Word and Excel documents on. As for me though, I don't think I could purchase a chip that has as spuratic performance levels as this. I do so many different things on my box, especially in content creation, that I much prefer the consistant performance of my current Athlon64 proc. across all applications.Just a suggestion, I would love to see some Adobe benchmarks on these chips... After Effects render times, Premeire Render times, Photoshop performance, etc as these are all applications I use nearly daily. Thanks.
HardwareD00d - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
When someone does a full set of benchmarks of the Pentium M for all categories across the board vs A64 and P4, then I'll seriously consider if this chip is worth its salt. Until then, I am unconvinced that it is anything special. If it is so good, then why hasn't Intel made any attempt to push it as a desktop chip?segagenesis - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
It was looking pretty good until you mentioned the price :( Ouch.Ozenmacher - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
And go Vikings!Ozenmacher - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
Merry Christmas to you too!skunkbuster - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
merry christmas!