It turns out I have pentium M's fucking everywhere. Because of this I have to call myself a pentium M enthusiast. I know how they work for the most part and I thought I knew everything. NOW I know EVEN FUCKING MORE.
So to start, Pentium 3's came out, didn't have too much advantage over the pentium 2. Had more cache, great whatever who cares I have 2 P2 450's. When the Pentium 4 came out it was shit on mobile. Some manufacturers made laptops with P4 desktop chips in the hope they would be better, they were really wrong. So for a short while Intel brought back the Pentium 3 mobile chips as a test in the water. People ate those machines and barfed up the pentium 4 mobile chips. When there were new chips expected intel had to think of something fast. AMD had these weird multicore things and soon scary ass 64 bit stuff all just crushing them at the same time. Smoething quick!! Uhhh, Penitum M!
If you don't know, the Pentium M was a pentium 3 with, in the Bantias cores, PAE and some other things turned off. Turns out that people who bought PM mobile workstations, like my HP NW8000, were expecting to be able to run this weird linux thing instead of windows! Heresy! Well there was still high demand by 2005 for pentium M cores with higher clocks, NX, and PAE. Well fine, heres Dothan, shut the fuck up. DOTHAN was the cool chip. It had PAE, NX, MX, MMX, SSE1/2/and some 3 capabilities but incomplete, it had better voltage regulation, could use as much wattage as you could throw at it. It is the sex object of pentium 3 users that wanted a 2 GHZ+ pentium 3 without overclocking. Its basically the desktop pentium 3.
Now, the other reason Dothan was the cool core was because the Core Solo and Core Duo were just Dothan cores with a die shrink and SSSE patched in. Since they weren't really in the states as much you would often see people import them (Wendell for example imported one from japan) in order to use them. But, oddly enough there wasn't much of a performance bump between a T1500 and a PM 760 (the 2 GHZ chips). They were the same chips in basically every way but die shrink and SSSE, at least as far as I can tell.
Now why am I calling myself a pentium M enthusiast? My macbook is a T2400, pentium M. My favorite laptop is a pentium M. My dream mobo is a pentium M with PCIe because thats fucking wierd. Pentium M's were really big for me in high school because they were easy to get cheap and I could upgrade my laptop for 8 bucks. They are still cool to me because I love the hardware.
Anyways, just some shit I learned.