Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: News about Alpha 21464 (EV8)

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 13:12:41 01/22/01

Go up one level in this thread


On January 22, 2001 at 09:52:01, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On January 22, 2001 at 03:10:18, Gregor Overney wrote:
>
>>
>>Well, good news. Does this mean I can finally buy a system with a 21364? So far,
>>all that Compaq is willing to deliver is still based on the 21264. At least four
>>months ago that was the music.
>>
>>The 21464 sounds like Intel's IA-64 - > it will take a very long time until it
>>hits the market.
>>
>>It is also a surprise to me that Compaq continues to push this technology after
>>loosing most of its top chip designers to AMD. The 21264 was the last design
>>Digital's excellent group developed.
>>
>>Why does the 21464 chip design try to execute up to eight instructions
>>simultaneously. Don't they know that the more instructions are executed
>>simultaneously the less they can clock their CPU? See Pentium IV vs. Pentium III
>>as an example. - Are they using high-T(c)'s for it? I don't think so.
>>
>>Gregor
>>
>
>
>why would you conclude that more instructions per cycle slows the cycle
>down?  Because the Intel does it?  Different animals.  Pentium = 64 bit
>bus.  Alpha=256.  With much higher memory bandwidth to boot..

The more instructions a clock you do the bigger the problem is
when you have a lot of branches in the program as currently processors
need to reload all the instructions.

I guess gregor is referring to
that where on the PIII/PII it can execute 3 instructions a clock
you have a 10 penalty for each misprediction

With P4 which can issue 4 on paper (in reality it has problems
which should prevent it from executing 4 simple integer instructions
a clock) but already has a branch misprediction penalty of 20 clocks
which is hell of a lot.

Alpha 21264 can do 4 instructions a clock (which IMHO is its most important
advantage to for example a K7) and its penalty for
mispredictions will be a real big problem for non-bitboard
oriented chessprograms, despite a
superb approach for the way in which the branches get predicted.

21164 appeared to be a big bummer for my program too when i finally
could run at it and compare it with a PII :)

Anyway I wonder how they are going to solve that problem with 8 instructions
a clock, because at a certain time bigger branch misprediction penalties
are going to be a too big bottleneck for nearly *any* realtime program.

Sounds to like me we need to wait another 10 years for that CPU!

At that time we won't look very shocked when someone announces a cpu
of 8 instructions a clock perhaps.

I have the kind of feeling that the improved P4 processor (so not
the current release) might be outgunning a lot of cpu's on integer
calculation (not FPU).

>>>found at : http://www.aceshardware.com/
>>>
>>>
>>>The more you read about the Alpha 21464 (EV8), the more impressed you are.
>>>Grandmaster Paul De Mone has published
>>>     his third part of the EV8 series:
>>>
>>>         The Compaq Alpha 21464, or EV8, is a superscalar RISC processor
>>>currently under development that can nominally issue and execute up to eight
>>>         instructions per clock cycle. It will likely have the ability to
>>>overlap the out-of-order execution of well over a hundred (possibly two hundred)
>>>         instructions at any given instant.
>>>
>>>  Read more here...
>>>http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT011601000000
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>well, well, well  .... I run the 100 meters way faster than this speedlight
>>>processor  ... ;))))



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.