Performance

Office applications 

Two properties of the Pentium M processor make it a good runner of office applications. First, the Pentium M has a rather large, 2-megabyte L2 cache. Second, this is a low-latency cache – only 5 cycles. That’s why the Pentium M looks so confident in Business Winstone 2004 which benchmarks the performance of a CPU in such applications as Microsoft Access 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft FrontPage 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Project 2002, Microsoft Word 2002, Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003 and WinZip 8.1.

SYSmark 2004 isn’t that optimistic about the performance of the Pentium M in office applications, though. The scripts in this benchmark simulate the user working with several applications at a time. The Pentium M doesn’t have any multi-threading technologies like Hyper-Threading, and its results are consequently not very high.