Author: Heiner Marxen
Date: 16:23:09 12/07/00
Go up one level in this thread
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?) Speaking for my program Chest, I would definitely prefer the 50% integer boost. I use 64 bit floating points (double) nearly exclusively for counters, which would overflow 32 bit (double has 53 bits mantissa, if the standard IEEE754 is used). If I had a truely portable way to use 64 bit integers in C, I would use those instead. OTOH, programmers still tend to avoid using floating point (at least I do). If FP would be known to be as fast as integer, that might well change, but then, maybe not ;-) Heiner >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.
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.