AOpen i915GMm-HFS

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AOpen’s i915GMm-HFS platform brings renewed life for the Pentium-M processor to be used in a desktop environment. In one fell swoop, Pentium-M desktop boards have gone from being incredibly out of date to right on par with today’s Pentium 4 / Athlon64 desktop platforms. Dual channel DDR2 memory, SATA-II RAID, PCI Express x16 graphics, HD digital audio, Dual PCIe GigE ports, this board is certainly feature friendly.

The board’s ability to connect to DVI, S-Video, and HDTV devices through the motherboard’s onboard graphics are especially intriguing, as when you combine this with native digital 7.1 S/PDIF HD Audio, and the low noise / low-power aspects of the Pentium-M processor, it seems as if you have the perfect combination for a quiet, powerful media center system. Unfortunately, the Pentium-M processor’s un-impressive media encoding performance throws a wrench in this scenario, but it’s still overall an excellent media box platform to start off with.

Performance wise, the 915GM (Alviso) chipset does not add much compared to the older 855GME chipset. While the ability to run newer PCI Express graphics cards and SATA2 disks will certainly allow for higher performance Pentium-M systems than is possible with the AGP-based 855GME, at this point in time, the new features of the chipset do not bring any exciting performance increases to the platform itself. The Pentium-M/915GM is an incredibly potent combination for gaming, but falls behind competing solutions in content creation, 3D rendering, raw number crunching, just about everything else.

While the Pentium-M platform is now up to date, feature wise, with other desktop platforms, the Pentium-M processor itself is not as attractive as it once was. While the Dothan core architecture is as efficient as ever, the new generation of desktop processors are becoming much more attractive. The Pentium-M won’t have dual-core processing abilities until ~2006 when the next generation “Yonah” core hits. In addition, today’s Pentium-M does not have 64-bit processing abilities, does not have Hyper-threading abilities, nor does it have an on-die memory controller. Combined, these make the Pentium-M a tough sell for the desktop market, although we think the Pentium-M will still sell in its niche market, those who want high performance with absolutely minimal noise.