Introduced in March 2003, the Pentium M is an x86 architecture microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. The processor was originally designed for use in laptop personal computers. It was codenamed "Banias" before its introduction. The codenames of the Pentium M are all locations in Israel, the location of the Pentium M design team.
The Pentium M represents a radical departure for Intel, as it is not a low-power version of the desktop-oriented Pentium 4, but instead a heavily modified version of the Pentium III design (itself a modified form of the Pentium II). It is optimised for power efficiency, a vital characteristic for extending notebook computer battery life. Running with very low average power consumption and much lower heat output than desktop processors, the Pentium M runs at a lower clock speed than the contemporary Pentium 4 desktop processor series, but with similar performance (e.g. a 1.6 GHz Pentium M can typically attain or exceed the performance of a 2.4 GHz Northwood Pentium 4 (FSB400, no Hyper-Threading Technology)).
The Pentium M couples the execution core of the Pentium III with a Pentium 4 compatible bus interface, an improved instruction decoding/issuing front end, improved branch prediction, SSE/SSE2 support, and a larger cache. The usually power-hungry secondary cache uses an innovative access method to avoid switching on any parts of it not being accessed. Other power saving methods include dynamically variable clock frequency and core voltage, allowing the Pentium M to run slowly (typically 600 MHz) when the system is idle in order to conserve energy.
The processor forms part of the Intel Centrino platform.
Although this CPU was intended strictly as a mobile processor at first, desktop motherboards were manufactured for it in limited quantities beginning in late 2004, and Intel began tweaking the core for the possible release of a desktop version around the same time.