Memory performance

The Pentium M 1.4GHz's use of DDR333 memory gives it a clear edge in Sandra's memory bandwidth tests. With notebook motherboard BIOSes, there really isn't any room for memory tweaking, so scores are a little lower than we're used to seeing with DDR266- and DDR333-equipped desktop systems.

Our Linpack results clearly illustrate the Pentium M 1.4GHz's large L1 and L2 caches. The Pentium M is very fast until it hits matrix sizes near 900KB, where performance drops off as we move from the chip's massive 1MB L2 cache to main memory.

In Cachemem's memory bandwidth tests, the Pentium M 1.4GHz is way out ahead in the read bandwidth test, but slightly trails the Mobile Pentium 4 1.8GHz when it comes to write bandwidth.

With a 2048KB block size and 512-byte stride, the Pentium M 1.4GHz has slightly higher memory latency than the Mobile Pentium 4 1.8GHz. Let's widen the scope a little and look at the full set of Cachemem results. I've color coded the levels of the memory hierarchy, from L1 cache to main memory, to make them easier to see.

Despite its power saving features, the Pentium M 1.4GHz's latencies are actually quite reasonable when compared with the Mobile Pentium 4 1.8GHz.