Author: Robin Smith
Date: 16:34:30 07/01/99
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On July 01, 1999 at 17:53:45, Derek Bays wrote: >On July 01, 1999 at 14:53:11, O. Veli wrote: > >> I apologize if this has been mentioned before but I would like to learn if >>there is a difference between these processors in chess strength. I heard that >>there was not a whole lot difference between 486DX and SX some years back. Is >>the situation same this time? Would a top level program play as strong on a >>Celeron 466 as on a PII 450? How about chips by companies other than Intel? >>There is information on this on Rebel site. Is that applicable to other chess >>programs as well? Thanks. > > >Hello there, I am responding to your posting because I am currently in the >process of upgrading my 486 dx4-100 to a Celeron based system with a 366MHZ >CPU which I will overclock to around 400MHZ. I've been browsing the Intel >site www.intel.com and from what I can see there isn't a whole lot of difference >between the Celeron processors and the PII's in the number crunching department >ie) raw data used in spreadsheet applications, as well as the evaluations >generated from a chess engine. Note that this is not the case when we are >talking about 3D graphics capability. The PII & PIII's seem to excel in the >3D graphics arena, and this seems to be what makes them so popular. However >since I prefer to run my serious chess engines in DOS to eliminate Windows >overhead and maximize my CPU's performance, I don't really think there would be >much of a difference between say a Celeron466A and the PII400 or even 450. Most >professional chess programs don't use 3D graphics capability, and even if they >do you can disable it to increase playing strength. > >As for the new AMD chips, they are nice, and I know Rebel loves them, scoring >higher with them than any other Intel CPU by a few points, but they are a super >socket 7 CPU and would limit the ability to upgrade to a slot CPU later on, so I >decided to go with a Celeron 366A SEPP. They are good for overclocking and allow >me to upgrade to a PII or PIII without having to buy a whole new motherborad. > >Lastly, I don't know about you but when I switched from my 486sx25 to a >486dx4100 I sure noticed s difference :) Hope this long winded reply answers >your questions. > >-Derek. A Celeron running at both the same processor and memory bus speeds should be about the same for chess as a P III at the same clock speed. For small, fast programs like Fritz the Celeron even has a slight edge due to it's full speed cache. A really good, fairly inexpensive chess computer can be made by taking a 300A Celeron and over-clocking to the equivalent of 450 Mhz. I have successfully built 3 such machines and every one over-clocked just fine. For slow search, large knowledge programs the bigger cache size of the AMD processor is probably the best.
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