6. Technology Behind Pentium-M Or Banias

Intel's First Independently Designed Mobile Processor

If you hadn't heard much about Pentium-M so far, you might have been surprised to read that Intel's new mobile processor doesn't seem to have a close relative in Intel's desktop family of CPUs and that its clock frequency is obviously lower than that of the current high-end mobile processor Pentium 4-M. With Pentium-M or 'Banias,' Intel is starting some kind of new era in the mobile computing segment. While in all the decades before, mobile processors of Intel, AMD or Apple were direct derivates of desktop processors, Pentium-M is Intel's first complete stand-alone CPU development for mobile systems.

'Banias,' as Intel used to codename Pentium-M until recently, was designed for the power-starved mobile environment only, and thus the priorities were different than what we know for desktop processors. While desktop or server CPUs have only one major target, to offer as much performance as possible, mobile processors have to be as power-stingy as possible, especially in the Intel-propagated future world of wireless LAN everywhere you go. Therefore, Banias was designed to save power and still supply satisfying performance.

Clock Frequency? Is That Supposed To Be Important?

From the little amount of technical information Intel provided at last year's Microprocessor Forum, it seems that the Israel-based design team under Mooly Eden did not come up with a major new wonder technology, but with something that seems to be a cross of Pentium III and Pentium 4, plus many clever little tweaks to save power without sacrificing too much performance. Eden's team realized that each and every processor clock cycle costs valuable battery power, so it made perfect sense to design Banias for a high IPC (instructions per cycle) rate, so it can do a lot of work in only a few clock cycles. The logical result is that Banias has a shorter pipeline and runs at lower clock frequencies than the clock speed racer Pentium 4. This alone is of course some kind of surprise, because who would have expected that the new Centrino notebooks will come with a lower clock frequency tag than current notebooks?

I doubt, however, that the clock frequency issue will be a major problem for Intel's marketing machine. As long as Banias delivers performance, people will believe in Intel's new mobile processor, just as they've done for decades. AMD has proven well enough that clock frequency is not everything as long as the product is convincing and the marketing is clever.