Pentium 3s

Is Intel Pentium M better than Intel Pentium 4?

Well this laptop that my friend had is an sony type laptop, well I see that he had a Intel Pentium M(1.80GHZ), well he said that his laptop processor is better than my desktop(Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHZ), well so which one is better?

Public Comments

1. They both fail
2. Apples to oranges really. The pentium M class processor is designed for notebooks, which means it draws less power. This obviously results in a decrease in performance vs desktop processors such as the Pentium 4 you mentioned. In terms of pure clock speed, the pentium 4 is faster, but consumes much more power.
3. The Pentium M represented a new and radical departure for Intel, as it was not a low-power version of the desktop-oriented Pentium 4, but instead a heavily modified version of the Pentium III Tualatin design (itself based on the Pentium Pro core design). It is optimised for power efficiency, a vital characteristic for extending notebook computer battery life. Running with very low average power consumption and much lower heat output than desktop processors, the Pentium M runs at a lower clock speed than the laptop version of the Pentium 4 (The Pentium 4-Mobile, or P4-M), but with similar performance - a 1.6 GHz Pentium M can typically attain or even surpass the performance of a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4-M. The Pentium M 740 has been tested to perform up to approximately 7,400 MIPS and 3.9 GFLOPS (using SSE2).