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Subject: Re: P4 code: There may be some hope

Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto

Date: 15:44:36 09/27/01

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On September 27, 2001 at 18:15:29, Nolan Denson wrote:

>In the
>context of whole application, speedup is obviously limited by the fraction
>of the execution time spent in vector loops (Amdahl's law).

Hmm, that would be ... 0 ?

>Besides,
>vectorization alone is not always the way to befenit from P4. This processor
>has other rich features that our compiler can exploit to boost performance.

Really? Then why is everything running so slow?

>Another note. SSE2 *does* support integer operations, in fact it is a full
>extension of 64-bit MMX(tm) technology into 128-bits. So tell your friends!
>SSE/SSE2 is not just FP alone, it is also integers.

Too bad chessboards dont have 128 squares eh? Maybe it's possible to
do bitboards ops in them with a bearable penalty, but all data structures
will also double in size, and the P4 doesn't exactly have huge caches.

As a comparisation, I rewrote the popcount function of crafty in
optimized MMX assembly for the Athlon and the net speed gain was...1%

I don't know what speedup, if any, people with a P4 saw with it.

I don't think SSE has 'first bit set' or 'last bit set' function
either. That would require continous packing/unpacking from the
SSE code to normal integer registers. Horrors.

>Crafty, indeed is very hard to optimize, and vectorization has not given us
>any benefit at all so far. But maybe you are happy to hear that our team has
>two chess hobbyist as well, and that our near future focus will be on
>improving integer performance. I keep you posted if we have something
>interesting to report.
>Aart

'Near future'...nothing concrete of course. Interesting that although
the vast majority of code out there is integer and they appearently
didn't care for it (or already gave up ;).

You mailed Intel. What did you expect? They can't say: 'sorry but the
P4 just sucks (for chess)' _and_ keep their jobs ;)

--
GCP



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