Pentium M vs. Prescott @ Insight64

Hos insight64 kan man læse en længere artikel der handler om hvor vidt man bør købe sig en Pentium Mobile som er baseret på "Dothan" kernen fremfor en Prescott CPU. En Pentium M "Dothan" som bruger ca. 21W skulle ifølge deres beregninger kunne yde det samme som en 3,6GHz Prescott der bruger ca. 100W.



"Not all Intel 90nm processors require vast amounts of power to deliver competitive computational performance. The latest Pentium M, based on the Dothan core, runs at 2GHz, but needs only 21 Watts to
match the performance of a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 that uses 82 Watts. Dothan contains more transistors (140 million) than Prescott (125 million), but uses only one fourth the power. Dothan?s designers
opted to use slightly slower transistors than Prescott?s, a decision that makes a dramatic difference in overall power consumption. If Intel?s dual-core desktop processors drop their clock frequency to 2.5GHz, each core will consume approximately 40 Watts and will score approximately 1200 on the SPECint test, for a combined performance of 2400 on SPECint at 100 Watts. A single core design that performs at this level would have to operate at 4.6GHz, and at that frequency, the chip would consume
at least 130 Watts.
Even this level of performance might be hard to achieve, since the latest 3.6GHz P4 actually delivers
less performance than the earlier 3.4GHz model.
The transition to multi-core processors raises few software visible"

Link til [pdf] filen: http://www.insight64.com/downloads/LongLiveDualCore.pdf