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Sudhain is running a review about a desktop Pentium M setup. And I have to say, they pretty much get it right. For about two or three years now, I’ve been saying that it was a mistake to drop the finely tuned P6 core (of which the Pentium 2 and 3 were based on), and pick up the clunky, overheating, poor performing Pentium 4 core.

Over the past few years, the Pentium 4 has only gotten worse, while AMD’s K7 core offerings have only gotten better. When the P6 core was locked up in the attic, a Pentium 3 and an Athlon running at the same speed got very similar results, both excelling in different areas. The main selling point of the Pentium 3 was the fact that it had the SSE floating point math SIMD language and Athlons didn’t; or at least, not right away.

However, many did not believe this was much of a selling point, even though for floating point math heavy applications SSE was a godsend; everyone purchased Athlons as fast as AMD could manufacture them. Slowly, AMD soaked up a larger and larger chunk of the x86 desktop market, and Intel wondered why their new Pentium 4 product was failing.

Intel so far has not improved the Pentium 4 core much at all. They have improved some of the flaws, such as using pricey and under-performing Rambus memory and switching over to dual banks of DDR2 to feed the Pentium 4′s insatiable hunger for memory bandwidth. However, in the mean time, AMD was developing the Opteron core, in all it’s onboard memory controller glory.

Having an onboard memory controller helps deal with not having enough memory bandwidth to do data heavy calculations constantly. Even if the Opteron had bus bandwidth in excess of what the Pentium 4 has now, the lack of a super fast integrated memory controller would still give it very poor performance. In other words, x86 sucks.

Sudhian’s review almost gets this. Its not because the Pentium M is designed better, and doesn’t need lots of memory bandwidth, its because x86 was designed by a retard and even if you gave the Pentium M more memory bandwidth, it couldn’t use it effectively.

All in all, that looks like a great candidate for fast, small, sub-$400 computers.