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Subject: Re: Crafty 14.5 peformance on the Mac

Author: Jay Scott

Date: 17:11:39 01/24/98

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On January 21, 1998 at 18:18:17, John Scalo wrote:

>On my PowerBook G3/250 (hash table = 768k, pawn hash = 80k) --
...
>              time:  3.43  cpu:100%  mat:0  n:212481  nps:61947

I found this strangely slow, and just got around to running some
tests today. I used a PowerMac 7200/90 with a G3 upgrade card,
whose specs I do not know. :-( But I ran the same test and got
nearly identical results, so it's comparable to the PowerBook.

Searching to depth 9, to get a longer baseline, gave ~67 nps,
not significantly different.

Then I tried MacChess 4.0. Searching to depth 7 took it less
than one second and didn't give an accurate speed, so I went
to depth 9. It reported ~250K nps. From my experience, that's
at the lower end of its normal range--it's what you'd expect
in this position.

Considering chip performance alone, I'd expect crafty to run
rather faster on a G3 Mac than on a PPro 200.

But Bob reports:
>same ballpark as pentium pro 200...

MacChess is definitely not as smart a program as crafty, but
I don't think it's 3.7 times dumber. :-) And of course it's
optimized for the PowerMac, while crafty is optimized for an
Intel box. I can't prove anything, but from the numbers I
suspect that crafty's taking a big hit on the Mac from some
compiler deficiency or sneaky implementation detail.

  Jay



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