Inside the Machine

The Pentium M

In order to meet the new challenges posed by the power-efficient computing paradigm, Intel’s Israel-based design team drew on the older, time-tested P6 microarchitecture as the basis for its new low-power design, the Pentium M. The Pentium M takes the overall pipeline organization and layout of the P6 in its Pentium III incarnation and builds on it substantially with a number of innovations, allowing it to greatly exceed its predecessor in both power efficiency and raw performance (see Table 12-1).

Table 12-1. Features of the Pentium M

Introduction Date	March 12, 2003
Process	0.13 micron
Transistor Count	77 million
Clock Speed at Introduction	1.3 to 1.6 GHz
L1 Cache Size	32KB instruction, 32KB data
L2 Cache Size (on-die)	1MB

Most of the Pentium ...