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Subject: Re: Why is P4 less efficient than Athlon (or P3) for chess programs ?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 16:38:29 07/03/03

Go up one level in this thread


On July 03, 2003 at 16:48:07, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>On July 03, 2003 at 16:23:10, Russell Reagan wrote:
>
>>On July 03, 2003 at 15:02:55, Joachim Rang wrote:
>>
>>>The main reason is, that Athlon and P3 have 9 instructions per cycle and P4 has
>>>only 6.
>>
>>Also the length of the pipeline on the P3 is 10, which means that a mispredicted
>>branch costs 10 cycles. On the P4 the length of the pipeline is 20, which means
>>it costs 20 cycles for a mispredicted branch. I may be wrong about the actual
>>numbers (10 and 20, but I think they are close). I'm not sure what the length is
>>on the Athlon. Anyone know?
>
>Pentium 3: 12 cycles
>Pentium 4: 20 cycles
>Athlon: 10 cycles
>Opteron/Athlon 64: 12 cycles
>
>In addition to unpredictable branches and parallelism, the P4 also has 8k of L1
>cache vs. the Athlon's 64k. The P4's cache is faster, but that may not make up
>for the difference in size with typical chess programs.
>
>-Tom

That's slightly inaccurate.  The PIV has 8k of L1 data cache, but it also
has a 12K micro-op trace cache that is also L1.  The 12K is the number of
micro-ops Intel claims it stores, but I have never found them saying how
many "bytes" that turns into.  But I would imagine it is at least 24K if not
more as 1-byte instructions are pretty rare I'd think, in a RISCY-type
internal architecture.





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