The Pentium M is a family of mobile bit single-core x86 microprocessors with the modified Intel P6 microarchitecture introduced in March and forming a part of the Intel Carmel notebook platform under the then new Centrino brand. The Pentium M replaced the laptop version of the Pentium 4 the Pentium 4-Mobile , or P4-M , which suffered from power consumption and heat problems.
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 II core design, which in turn had been a heavily improved evolution of the Pentium Pro. It is optimized 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 β a 1. The usually power-hungry secondary cache uses an access method which only switches on the portion being accessed.
The main intention behind the large cache was to keep a decent-sized portion of it still available to the processor even when most of the L2 cache was switched off, but its size led to a welcome improvement in performance. Other power saving methods include dynamically variable clock frequency and core voltage, allowing the Pentium M to throttle clock speed when the system is idle in order to conserve energy, using the SpeedStep 3 technology which has more sleep stages than previous versions of SpeedStep.
With this technology, a 1. The power requirements of the Pentium M varies from 5 watts when idle to 27 watts at full load. This is useful to notebook manufacturers as it allows them to include the Pentium M into smaller notebooks. Shuttle Inc. Pentium M processors are also of interest to embedded systems ' manufacturers because the low power consumption of the Pentium M allows the design of fanless and miniaturized embedded PCs.
