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Subject: Re: the empire strikes back

Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto

Date: 02:53:25 01/10/02

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On January 10, 2002 at 05:07:37, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>It's the first x86 chip to have a trace cache.

Hardly impressive, crippled as implemented, minor extensions of
a known theme.

>Its branch predictor is probably the best ever made
>by anybody.

Again, minor extension of a known theme. They also had no
choice given the pipeline.

>It's the first chip that I know of that has a double clocked ALU.

Yes! This is the one thing I found very impressive.

>It has SMT logic (although not enabled currently).

Nothing new in that, and as you say, it's not even enabled.

>How do you know that a "smarter" chip would outperform a faster clocked chip?

I didn't think I said that (if I did, it was a typo). I just would _like_
that to be the case, because I find them more interesting.

>Besides, how do you know it's even possible to make a smarter chip than the P3?

Even Intel seems to think so given the Itanium. The first benchmarks
weren't exactly encouraging though. I hope that improves with the next
generations soon.

--
GCP



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