> "Well, the Pentium M was just a refreshed PIII" I respectfully disagree. These are direct quotes from the Wikipedia article mentioned above. The Pentium M

> "Well, the Pentium M was just a refreshed PIII" I respectfully disagree. These are direct quotes from the Wikipedia article mentioned above. The Pentium M (Banias) was an innovation of increasing the (maximum) speed vs. power ratio. Intel chose not to extend to x64 because they wanted to market an entirely different 64-bit architecture, the Itanium processors. I am very pleased that AMD came out with it and forced Intel to do the same, but the Pentium M was (for microprocessors) a true innovation. "The Pentium M coupled the execution core of the Pentium III with a Pentium 4 compatible bus interface, an improved instruction decoding/issuing front end, improved branch prediction, SSE2 support, and a much larger cache. The usually power-hungry secondary cache uses an access method which only switches on the portion being accessed..." "Other power saving methods include dynamically variable clock frequency and core voltage, allowing the Pentium M to throttle clock speed when the system is idle in order to conserve energy, using the SpeedStep 3 technology (which has more sleep stages than previous versions of SpeedStep)..." "...Pentium M varies from 5 watts when idle to 27 watts at full load..."