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Subject: Re: Integer vs. Floating Point

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 14:57:52 12/07/00

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On December 07, 2000 at 15:20:02, Roy Eassa wrote:

>But what impact, if any, does floating point have on such chess apps as Crafty,
>Chess Tiger, Fritz, Junior, Hiarcs, Shredder, et. al.?  (E.g., which would help
>them more: a 50% boost in integer speed only, or a 200% boost in floating speed
>only?)

At present, we all use ints on PC platform machines, so making FP faster
wouldn't help until programs were modified to use FP math where possible.

>
>
>On December 07, 2000 at 15:11:55, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On December 07, 2000 at 14:53:11, Roy Eassa wrote:
>>
>>>5+ years ago, in another chess computer forum, I recall posting that computer
>>>chess makes essentially no use of floating point arithmetic.  I.e., the
>>>performance of the CPU's integer arithmetic was overwhelmingly more important to
>>>its performance running chess software than its floating point performance.
>>>
>>>Is that correct in today's top programs?  Was I even correct back then?
>>
>>
>>back then it depended on the architecture.  IE Cray was no slouch at FP
>>arithmetic, and in many cases FP was a fast or faster than int math.  In
>>today's PC, FP is slower, but with the multiple-pipe superscalar approach,
>>some FP could be beneficial as those operations could be done in parallel
>>with int operations.



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