Pentium M vs Pentium 4 performance comparison using Super Pi
2nd January 2007
Recently I was asked to measure the performance of my LG LM70 Express notebook (configuration 32HR or something like this). As I like small programs, I grabbed Super Pi and ran it:
The person who asked me ran exactly the same Super Pi test on three more systems, but for 2M digits only:
his Dell notebook with Pentium M 740 1.73GHz: 1:49
some Pentium 4 3GHz down-clocked to 2.7GHz: 1:50
some other Pentium 4 at 2.8GHz: 1:47
That was a kind of an interesting trend here, so I ran Super Pi at work on yet another Pentium 4 3Ghz:
with HT (Hyper-Threading) enabled:
and with HT disabled (and no test for 32M digits):
As expected, disabling HT slightly improved times – Super Pi has a single calculating thread, and with no HT gets more actual CPU time.
Well… It might be possible that Pentium M is a cool CPU, or Pentium 4 is poor 
, at the same frequency.
Comments are welcome.
Note: no efforts were made to ensure that measuring/testing conditions, both hardware and software, are similar. Some tests were run with Super Pi at “High” process priority, some at “Normal”. Actual FSB frequencies, memory latencies etc were not checked.
Update: see this benchmarking report for more details on Pentium M vs Pentium 4.
May 3rd, 2007 at 16:51
[...] Pentium M vs Pentium 4 performance comparison using Super Pi [...]