Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Some advice needed

Author: Christophe Theron

Date: 19:48:46 04/03/00

Go up one level in this thread


On April 03, 2000 at 22:08:49, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>On April 03, 2000 at 20:10:00, Christophe Theron wrote:
>
>>I would suggest to go for the Athlon. The PIII really sucks, for my program at
>>least. I don't know why, but the PIII-450 is slower than the K6-2 400 for Chess
>>Tiger (close to 10% slower!).
>
>The K6-2 has much shorter pipelines than the PIII. That makes it significantly
>faster, but also keeps the clock speeds relatively low.


I suppose this explains why the K6-2 can execute more instruction per cycle than
the PIII: each pipeline "step" in the K6-2 does more work. On the other hand,
all this work to do means that the clock speed cannot be pushed too far. Is this
what you mean?



>The reason the Athlon may be better than the PIII for computer chess is the huge
>L1 caches. I suspect the integer core of the Athlon is pretty much equivalent to
>the PIII's.


Athlon or K6-2, it is the same thing for Tiger (at the same clock speed I mean).
So I'm not sure the L1 cache makes a difference here. And, at least for my
program, it seems that the Athlon integer core is better than the PIII's.

Of course, this is not a general statement. It happens to be so for Chess Tiger,
but I understand it can be different for other chess programs.



    Christophe



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.