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Subject: Re: Floating point VS Integer Math.

Author: Bo Persson

Date: 03:11:31 05/17/98

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On May 15, 1998 at 01:51:18, Ivan Tirado wrote:

[snip]
>  Thanks for the reply. Yes, you're right. I have seen this behaviour
>myself with the add - substract on floating point numbers. Remember that
>multiplication is basically fast addition, so an algirithim may still
>benefit from FP multiply, although not from FP divide. This, of course
>from a mathematical standpoint, since the FP internals may alter the
>outcome ( may or may not be faster, platform dependent ). Now, since
>you've stated that chess programs use a lot of add-substracts with
>integers, wouldn't MMX give a BIG speedup to the eval? Or is coding for
>MMX too hard/inconvenient? I believe that an eval function optimized for
>MMX would vastly outperform a similar algorithm in a non MMX setup.
>Would you please comment on this?

The problem with using MMX instructions is that they are not
yet supported by the compiler optimizer. I have tried using
inlined asm MMX-instructions with MSVC. The result was that
although the bitmap ops ran faster, the other instructions were
less well optimized by the compiler. Particularly register
allocations were a lot more conservative. This led to additional
load/store of variables, negating the effect of the MMX ops.


Bo Persson
bo.persson@mbox3.swipnet.se






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