Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 16:17:59 08/18/00
Hello, i think i have to react on the statement that merced sucks for crafty because it would be wrong to leave that like this. If looking up arrays is that slow, then merced will rock for crafty RELATIVELY seen to other progs, as they need to use all kind of shift instructions. My program at least will. My whole program is array based. Everything is arrays. Crafty just needs a single array look up then can fiddle with registers with 4 instructions a clock. Now i don't know whether most assembly programs and C++ / C strong programs also do this, but if they only do it partly, then crafty is greatly benefitting, as the LastOne and such functions go real quick. I'm sure AND, OR, XOR is still real fast at the merced and it's 64 bits which also saves quit a lot. So despite some negative reactions here, i'm sure Crafty bitboards will do well for crafty. If it still isn't that heaven, i'm sure that it's successors will do even better for crafty. Let's keep the 21164 versus 21264 in mind. The merced/itanium looks like a 21164, so we can expect real soon a new version of it which will do even better. In the end it's about the relative speed. If crafty is not much faster on it, but if nonbitboarders are dead slow, then crafty rocks obviously on the processor.
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