Clock Speed based Performance Comparison

While the price-based performance comparison is the more practical comparison, a comparison based on clock speed is quite possibly the more interesting. We took an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Socket-939, 2.0GHz) and pitted it against our 2.0GHz Pentium M 755 to see how efficient Intel's mobile core happens to be.

 Business/General Use
   AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz)  Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz)  Performance Advantage
Business Winstone 2004 22.1 24.2 10% (Pentium M)
SYSMark 2004 - Communication 134 127 6% (Athlon 64)
SYSMark 2004 - Document Creation 169 187 11% (Pentium M)
SYSMark 2004 - Data Analysis 133 108 23% (Athlon 64)
Microsoft Office XP with SP-2 544 546 Tie
Mozilla 1.4 360 321 11% (Pentium M)
ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0 553 574 4% (Athlon 64)
Ahead Software Nero Express 6.0.0.3 497 510 3% (Athlon 64)
WinZip Computing WinZip 8.1 448 396 12% (Pentium M)
WinRAR 566 370 53% (Athlon 64)
Winner - - AMD Athlon 64 3200+

The Pentium M is extremely competitive with the Athlon 64 in our business/general use tests, even outperforming it in four of the benchmarks. However, in tests where the Pentium M's 2MB L2 cache isn't enough, the Athlon 64 pulls ahead - such as the Data Analysis SYSMark 2004 test and the WinRAR test.

Multitasking Content Creation

 Multitasking Content Creation
   AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz)  Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz)  Performance Advantage
Content Creation Winstone 2004 30.9 27.9 11% (Athlon 64)
SYSMark 2004 - 3D Creation 174 168 4% (Athlon 64)
SYSMark 2004 - 2D Creation 214 238 11% (Pentium M)
SYSMark 2004 - Web Publication 161 160 Tie
Mozilla and Windows Media Encoder 685 641 6% (Pentium M)
Winner - - Tie

Surprisingly enough, the Athlon 64 and the Pentium M 755 give us a tie here. Content creation applications tend to be more memory bandwidth sensitive than not, so we were a bit surprised to see that the Pentium M did so well here, but it appears that the low latency L2 cache is able to make up for its lack of memory bandwidth. To AMD's credit, as applications increase in size, the Pentium M wouldn't be able to compete as well, but for present day applications, it's interesting to see the Pentium M do so well without the aid of AMD's on-die memory controller.

Video Creation/Photo Editing

 Video Creation/Photo Editing
   AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz)  Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz)  Performance Advantage
Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1 364 332 8% (Pentium M)
Adobe Premiere 6.5 405 418 3% (Athlon 64)
Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator 1.5 349 411 15% (Athlon 64)
Winner - - AMD Athlon 64 3200+

The race is fairly close here, but AMD pulls away in the two video editing tests.

Audio/Video Encoding

 Audio/Video Encoding
   AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz)  Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz)  Performance Advantage
MusicMatch Jukebox 7.10 540 529 2% (Pentium M)
DivX Encoding 40.8 36 13% (Athlon 64)
XviD Encoding 27.8 25.4 10% (Athlon 64)
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0 1.85 1.83 Tie
Winner - - AMD Athlon 64 3200+

The Pentium 4 completely blew the Pentium M away in the video encoding tests and while the Athlon 64 also manages to outperform it, the margin of victory isn't nearly as great. With a faster memory bus, it is possible that the Pentium M could significantly lessen the gap. Regardless, the win still goes to the Athlon 64.

Gaming

 Gaming
   AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz)  Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz)  Performance Advantage
Doom 3 90.3 85 6% (Athlon 64)
Halo 87 85.2 2% (Athlon 64)
UT2004 58.7 55.2 6% (Athlon 64)
Wolfenstein: ET 93.1 85.5 9% (Athlon 64)
Winner - - AMD Athlon 64 3200+

Gaming performance is extremely close, but AMD takes the slight lead over the Pentium M.

3D Rendering

 3D Rendering
   AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz)  Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz)  Performance Advantage
Discreet 3dsmax 5.1 (DX) 278 269 3% (Pentium M)
Discreet 3dsmax 5.1 (OGL) 344 350 2% (Pentium M)
SPECapc 3dsmax 6 1.28 1.23 4% (Athlon 64)
Winner - - Tie

3D Rendering performance is even closer between these two, leaving us with a tie between the Athlon 64 and the Pentium M at the same clock speed.

Professional Applications

 Professional Applications
   AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz)  Intel Pentium M 755 (2.0GHz)  Performance Advantage
SPECviewperf 8 - 3dsmax-03 15.47 10.73 44% (Athlon 64)
SPECviewperf 8 - catia-01 12.06/strong> 9.096 33% (Athlon 64)
SPECviewperf 8 - light-07 12.08 10.71 13% (Athlon 64)
SPECviewperf 8 - maya-01 15.69 15.47 Tie
SPECviewperf 8 - proe-03 15.22 10.74 42% (Athlon 64)
SPECviewperf 8 - sw-01 12.24 8.593 42% (Athlon 64)
SPECviewperf 8 - ugs-04 13.99 10.24 37% (Athlon 64)
Winner - - AMD Athlon 64 3200+

The SPECviewperf 8 suite goes to AMD, as the Athlon 64 completely dominates the Pentium M, clock for clock, in these very memory bandwidth, latency and FP intensive tests.

Pentium M vs. Athlon 64 Clock Speed Based Comparison Conclusion

While the Athlon 64 3200+ pulled away with the win in most of our test suites (tying twice), the Pentium M 755 put up a very hard fight. Given how strongly the Pentium M competes with the Athlon 64 on a clock for clock basis, the obvious answer would be to use the Pentium M to compete with AMD instead of the Pentium 4, right?

Wrong. The fundamental issue is that although the Pentium M is surprisingly competitive with the Athlon 64 on a clock for clock basis, the Pentium M's architecture can't scale to the same clock speeds that the Athlon 64 can. The fact of the matter is that while the Pentium M will hit 2.26GHz by the end of 2005, the Athlon 64 will be on its way to 3.0GHz and beyond. It's the same argument that was present during the Pentium III vs. Pentium 4 transition period, and we all know the result of that transition.

The Pentium M's astounding successes against the Athlon 64, despite the lack of an on-die memory controller and only a single channel DDR333 memory bus, are without a doubt due to its 10 cycle L2 cache. We've seen how much a reduction in memory latency can do for performance - the Athlon 64 is a living, breathing example of that. But an even greater reduction in L2 cache latency is even more powerful under the right circumstances.

Price based Performance Comparison Final Words
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  • Jeff7181 - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link

    Give the Dothan a speed bump and some dual channel DDR400 and stay out of it's way...
  • MDme - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link

    well, now we FINALLY have a comprehensive review of the P-M, it's strengths and weaknesses. While the P-M is good. the A64 is still better.
  • Netopia - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link

    Yeah, I was about to say the same as #3.

    Why did you go to the trouble to list what the AthlonXP system would have in it and then not actually test or reference it anywhere in the article?

    I still have a bunch of AXP machines and regularly help others upgrade using XP-M's, so it would be interesting to see these at least included in reviews for a while.
  • CrystalBay - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link

    Hi, I noticed in the testbed an AXP3200/NF2U400 but there are no charts with this setup.
  • Beenthere - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link

    It's a pipe dream for those who wish Intel had their act together. It's already confirmed M don't scale well and is not effective for HD computing. It's performance is really some place between Sempron and A64 but certainly not a suitable competitor to A64 nor FX. Just another Hail Mary for a defunct Intel.
  • coldpower27 - Monday, February 7, 2005 - link

    Hmm, an interesting review on the Pentium M to say the least. Though are 2-2-2-10 timings for the Pentium M the best for this architecture???
  • 0ldman79 - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link

    It's interesting coming back and reading this after it's all settled, Core 2 seemed to be an evolution of the Pentium M line.

    Intel did hang the Netburst architecture up, though they added a lot of Netburst's integer design to Core 2 while designing Nehalem. AMD apparently believed that Intel was going to stick with Netburst and designed the FX line, while Intel went back to their earlier designs and lowered the clock speed, massively increased the IPC and parallelism and out-Phenom'ed the Phenom with Nehalem.

    Back then Intel believed that Dennard scaling would continue and they'd have 10GHz chips, turns out wider and slower is better.

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