Pentium M out the door, what's next
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 24, 2005 1:48 PM EST- Posted in
- Anand
As promised the Pentium M Desktop article using ASUS' Socket-478 to 479 adapter is live. I hope you all enjoy it. It doesn't look like there's too much potential for the Pentium M (Dothan) on the desktop, but Yonah may be another story. ASUS did an excellent job with the CT-479 adapter though, it's by far the best solution if you do want to use a Pentium M on the desktop.
With the Pentium M article out of the way, I'm going to spend this weekend working on the ATI Theater 550 review as well as a $999 MCE review I had pushed aside for a little while. I've received a lot of requests for articles similar to the WoW Performance Guide but for other games (e.g. Everquest 2). I've had the idea for a while but never really had the time, but I think my schedule may be open enough to squeeze in a few game performance articles.
I'm eagerly awaiting Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, unfortunately it comes out the day I leave to go visit AMD in Austin. It'll be a short trip so I should be able to enjoy the game over the weekend at least.
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is the perfect example of what's wrong with gaming on the Mac. Looking at the Mac game library you'll see a lot of the major titles, Doom 3, UT2004, WoW, etc... but the issue with games that are released on the Mac is that they usually take far too long to get there. Doom 3 is finally out on the Mac, and at one time I would've waited to play through it on the Mac but I grew bored of it last year on the PC and have no desire to play it on the Mac now. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of the next Splinter Cell, but it's not going to be out on the Mac so there's no way I'm waiting for it to be ported before playing it.
Then there's the issue of performance, both WoW and Doom 3 appear to run at about half the speed on the Mac as they do on the PC. Granted the Mac isn't a gaming platform, but this type of performance is just unacceptable since, architecturally, there's no explanation for the performance. It's a software/OS issue somewhere, but I'm hardly qualified to say where or why it still remains un-addressed by Apple. I guess I'd just like to be able to play the handful of games that I do play on the Mac, apparently that's too big of a wish.
So either this weekend or next week I'll be putting together a game machine in preparation for Chaos Theory :)
With the Pentium M article out of the way, I'm going to spend this weekend working on the ATI Theater 550 review as well as a $999 MCE review I had pushed aside for a little while. I've received a lot of requests for articles similar to the WoW Performance Guide but for other games (e.g. Everquest 2). I've had the idea for a while but never really had the time, but I think my schedule may be open enough to squeeze in a few game performance articles.
I'm eagerly awaiting Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, unfortunately it comes out the day I leave to go visit AMD in Austin. It'll be a short trip so I should be able to enjoy the game over the weekend at least.
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is the perfect example of what's wrong with gaming on the Mac. Looking at the Mac game library you'll see a lot of the major titles, Doom 3, UT2004, WoW, etc... but the issue with games that are released on the Mac is that they usually take far too long to get there. Doom 3 is finally out on the Mac, and at one time I would've waited to play through it on the Mac but I grew bored of it last year on the PC and have no desire to play it on the Mac now. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of the next Splinter Cell, but it's not going to be out on the Mac so there's no way I'm waiting for it to be ported before playing it.
Then there's the issue of performance, both WoW and Doom 3 appear to run at about half the speed on the Mac as they do on the PC. Granted the Mac isn't a gaming platform, but this type of performance is just unacceptable since, architecturally, there's no explanation for the performance. It's a software/OS issue somewhere, but I'm hardly qualified to say where or why it still remains un-addressed by Apple. I guess I'd just like to be able to play the handful of games that I do play on the Mac, apparently that's too big of a wish.
So either this weekend or next week I'll be putting together a game machine in preparation for Chaos Theory :)
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
32 Comments
View All Comments
sheik124 - Monday, March 28, 2005 - link
#21, here's your silent PC, a Zalman CNPS-7000A-Alcu CPU cooler, some thermally controlled case fans, and a Zalman VF700AlCu GPU cooler, tada, silenceMichael2k - Monday, March 28, 2005 - link
I'm wondering if the silent PC guys at Anandtech (or Anand himself) would be willing to do some cost, performance, and quiet comparisons between the various Macs and PCs they have around? We just saw a $2k silent PC when I know there are at least 15 'silent' Macs for under $2kiBooks
PowerBooks
Mac mini
eMacs
iMacs
PowerMacs
ViRGE - Saturday, March 26, 2005 - link
#11, that's a definite possibility, though I have not seen any evidence that their Mac code is inefficient due to something they did. Certainly the fact that Doom3 is so slow in spite of it being a native OpenGL app in the first place puts a lot of emphasis on the drivers though.red and black - Saturday, March 26, 2005 - link
#16,18: I did a little google searching and found the following benchmarks, which under linux show the high-end A64s totally demolishing high-end P4s:http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/... http://www.linuxhardware.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/...
Of course the linuxhardware.org people did a much less thorough job than the anandtech folks would, but hey, it's something. :)
Someone - Saturday, March 26, 2005 - link
#16: I don't know if Anand would be inclined to do that. It depends on how much of readers are willing to take a look at such an exclusive topic. AnandTech has to do articles that will appeal to the mass readers instead of a selected few.Heron - Saturday, March 26, 2005 - link
#13, I get what you mean. However, you still have to remember that Pentium 4 still holds much more advantage due to the video encoding and the floating point performance. A dip in performance from Northwood to Prescott made Intel lose ground. They cannot afford the same thing (Pentium M loses out in alot of content creation benchmarks), especially when Athlon64 is such a powerful competitor.red and black - Saturday, March 26, 2005 - link
How about a free-unix A64 vs P4 benchmark, with the A64 running 64 bit mode? What I and many other geeks are interested in is: "How quickly does (for example) mozilla compile? What if I'm building on a RAM file system?" I've heard that the A64 chips in 64 bit mode do well on this workload, but I haven't seen any real numbers.Or is this site only about Windows gamer setups?
ksherman - Saturday, March 26, 2005 - link
I suggest a 939 NF3 and NF4 non-SLI motherboard round up... I dont care for SLI, so I really dont know what to get (out side of the DFI board)Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, March 25, 2005 - link
The issue is that a Pentium M at 2.13GHz costs over $600 and is their flagship CPU in the line, thus you have to compare it to the highest end Pentium 4s and Athlon 64s.I also don't think the market wants a replay of the Pentium 4 introduction where performance dropped when moving to a new architecture. If Intel decided today to drop the Pentium 4 and move to the Dothan based Pentium M performance would drop in key areas like video encoding and anything relying on FP/SSE performance, that's frankly not acceptable. Yonah, I believe, will solve a lot of these issues.
Mark Little - Friday, March 25, 2005 - link
#10, Let me put this to you very clearly.From Anand's own performance numbers in the ASUS adapter article, the 2.13 GHz PM beats a 3.2 GHz P4 Prescott in 2/3 of the benchmarks. I think you will agree that a 3.2 GHz Prescott beats all the Celeron processors which top out at 2.8 GHz. Anandtech, you and everyone else thinks that the Celeron is ready for the desktop because it is a desktop processor.
Looking at the numbers, I think a PM at 2.13 GHz would beat every Celeron out there. It would probably beat a 2.4, 2.6 and 2.8 GHz P4 all running at 800 MHz FSB and having a higher clock speed. The damn thing beat a 3.73 GHz 1066 MHz FSB Extreme processor in the doom3 benchmark and came real close to beating a 3.6 GHz P4 in the ET benchmark. How is this not ready for the desktop?
I know the PM is not meant for that high of clock speeds. I was talking hypothetically. The processor at its current speed is ready for the desktop now. It wins some benchmarks and it loses some. What processor doesn't? Do you guys think the G4 is not ready for the desktop? It clocks in at 1.67 GHz and is equivalent to a PIV running at the same speed. Apple seems to think it is ready for the desktop since it but it in a desktop computer.
Hell, ASUS, Aopen and DFI all think the PM is ready for the desktop because they are making desktop motherboards and adapters. People don't want a 3.8 GHz furnace anymore. The desktop market has changed. It's just waiting for the rest of you.