PCMark04, 3DMark 2001 SE, 3DMark05

The popular benchmark PCMark04 is rather skeptical about the Pentium M 780. Why? PCMark04 uses multi-threading but Intel’s mobile processors do not support it in their hardware. This is also why the Pentium 4 processors look so advantageous against AMD’s Athlon 64.

But the Pentium M 780 is among the leaders in 3DMark2001. Could games be this processor’s forte?

The Pentium M 780 is slower than its main rival in 3DMark05, however. We think this is due to our using an AGP graphics card in the Pentium M platform, while the Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 platforms worked with PCI Express x16 graphics.

Well, the Pentium M isn’t brilliant in the CPU tests, either. This time the explanation is simple: these tests perform shaders on the central processor and actively use the FPU which is rather weak in the Pentium M by today’s standards.