Intel Pentium M

The Intel Pentium M was released in 2003 during the Pentium 4 era, and can be considered a successor to the Pentium III. It was designed for mobile and low power computers and based on the P6 architecture, with some improvements also taken from the Pentium 4.

There are two generations of Pentium Ms, the first one are Banias ones with 1 MiB of L2 Cache and manufactured with a 130 nm process. Then, Dothan Pentium Ms came with 2 MiB of L2 Cache and a 90 nm process.

There are no 64-bit Pentium Ms unlike for Pentium 4s. In 2006, the first Intel Core appeared as Core Solo and Core Duo processors (codenamed Yonah, still 32-bit), quickly succeeded by the 64-bit Core 2 Duos and Quads, before the Core i3, i5, i7 and later i9 appeared and remained in use for many generations until 2023. Nowadays, the Core brand is still used for their Core 3, 5, 7 and 9 processors.

Operating System Support

• A Pentium M will by itself not prevent any x86 Windows until 7 from running.
• Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 require the NX Bit feature, which only later Dothan (not all of them) Pentium Ms provide.
  • The NX Check can be bypassed on 32-bit Windows 8 and 8.1 with the W8CPUFeaturePatch software or via Hex Editing of some files, allowing them to run on Pentium Ms without NX Bit after being installed with another machine. We are however not aware of any Windows 10 running with such processors as they presumably removed the fallback software DEP/NX emulation.
  • However, if the Pentium M does provide NX support, installing and running Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 is straightforward.
• Any Linux Distributions still supporting x86 should work on a Pentium M.