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Subject: Re: Athlon vs Intel question?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 07:25:00 08/29/01

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On August 29, 2001 at 03:39:52, Pham Minh Tri wrote:

>I see that recently many computer chess programmers prefer Athlon to Intel. I
>have not any Athlon and experience about it (but planing to buy one). However, I
>see the benchmark of TSCP (in Tom Kerrigan site) shows that Intel is faster than
>Athlon in almost all cases. So I do not understand that preference: because of
>price only? Or is TSCP not a typical chess program (in terms of complexity)? Or
>do I miss something?

TSCP is a lousy sample for predicting performance for _real_ chess engines.
It is unsophisticated and small, and runs in the L1 cache of most any CPU.
As a result, its performance is not representative of what real chess engines
will do.

A better benchmark is the specint benchmark values from Crafty, which you
can find at spec.org.  Crafty is much larger, and the numbers give a better
idea of how the entire machine (CPU, L1, L2, memory bus) performs, rather than
just focusing on L1 cache.





>An additional question: Could VC6 optimize for Athlon?

Yes it will.  Michel optimized for the AMD when he ran Crafty in the recent
WMCCC tournament.


>Thanks.



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