Pentium 4M shows poor performance
theinquirer.net
"Desknotes", Pentium III-Ms do well
By Mike Magee, 07/03/2002 09:23:26 BST
THE VAUNTED 43% performance boost that Pentium
4 mobile chips are supposed to give over Pentium
III-Ms might only apply if you're Photoshopping or
Dreamweaving away, a report from ZD Net UK has
warned.
And despite Intel's grave warnings about using desktop
Pentium 4 CPUs in notebook setups, these type of
machines are hundreds of dollars cheaper and also
have reasonable battery lives, the same report
suggests.
Intel incensed quite a few manufacturers by introducing
its Pentium 4 mobile platform early, we reported
yesterday, but the report says that a Dell Inspiron it
tested showed no appreciable gains over machines
using the Pentium III-M mobile microprocessor.
This was particularly true of office applications, where
the Pentium III-M continues to shine.
That may be because office applications, like Microsoft
Word and its ilk, are not optimised for the Screaming
Sindy II extensions built into the Pentium 4 core.
Nevertheless, if you're one of the mobile warriors that
have to rapidly render videos of the AMD Hammer chip
- like a German journalist we saw at the Intel Developer
Forum last week - a fully fledged Pentium 4M mobile
may be the chip for you.
According to the review, the 1.7GHz Inspiron 8200
which Dell released earlier this week may actually lag
behind so called "desktop-notebook" configurations
and ZD Net said that in some tests it ran, it fell below a
1.13GHz Pentium III-M on office suites.
This is far from good news for Intel, which has rushed
to deliver the Pentium 4M ahead of time. Yesterday we
reported that ECS (Elitegroup) was likely to ship
100,000 notebooks, "Desknotes", using an ordinary
Pentium 4 in a notebook chassis.
The review did not test the enhanced Speedstep
configuration provided by the Pentium 4M, but we know
of old that Dell and other manufacturers had difficulties
delivering Speedstep machines for the Pentium III
notebook chip. |
