Author: David Dory
Date: 06:33:38 12/30/01
A little confusing since ALL the top Athlon's run at 1.6 GHZ. What differentiates thd "1600" "1700" "1800" and "1900" is the CPU's ability to run "overclocked", that is, within higher design parameters. They are stamped on the face, but you can't see it because of the heat sink and fan. They require excellent air flow for cooling, especially for the "overclocked" CPU's. I was looking for a good chess computer/personal computer, and knew the computer stores wouldn't allow me to run a chess program on their floor models, so - I took some Tic-Tac-Toe code in C++ (which, oddly enough has FULL minimax but not A/B) and made some alterations to it. Instead of the standard 9 it has 16 squares (but that took _way_ too long to ponder it's moves through the move tree), so I added some moves into the TTT grid to help things along. I put this onto a floppy and went to several stores in the morning when the stores wouldn't be busy. I tried the program out on Gateway, Compaq, HP, and Sony 2GHZ. The Gateway was the fastest, all others exactly the same. Then just to be thorough, I dropped into a small computer store. They didn't have anything I hadn't already tested in Intel boxes, but they had a 1.4GHZ Athlon. So I ran test1.exe on that machine. It was not quite as fast as the Intel boxes, but it caught my attention. I was really surprised because the 1.4 Athlon had a slower memory bus, (slower than the top end Athlon m/b, which in turn is slower than the P4 DDR memory bus) and test1 creates and deletes memory dynamically for every single position it analyzes (which for the test is several million positions). To say I was surprised is putting it mildly. I got the Athlon 1900, it's only running at 1700 for now, (BIOS set up issues) The stats are: ============================================================================== Test1.exe is an extended Tic-Tac-Toe test program. It works thru all the possible positions (about 858 Million), and is coded up in Turbo C++ (16 bit). After using a full minimax on all possible positions, it returns with it's first move, which is the end of the test. Tested results: Processor & Speed Time in Seconds =========================================================================== 1. Athlon 1.7 GHZ (MSI K7t266 Pro2 M/B) (w/512Megs) 566 (a) 2. Athlon 1.4 GHz (w/256Megs) 661 (b) 3. Pentium 4 2.0 GHZ (w/256 or 512Megs) 634 (b) 4. Pentium 3 900 Mhz (laptop w/512Megs Mem.) 860 (a) All were running Windows OS, with test1 running in a console (DOS) window. a): Windows 2000 b): Windows XP If for some reason you'd like a copy of the program, let me know and I'll email it to you. It's just a test utility, no bells or whistles. Dave
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