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Subject: Re: A Strange Result, A P-IV at 1.7 Ghz Outperforms an Athlon at I.4 Ghz!

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 00:13:53 01/21/02

Go up one level in this thread


On January 21, 2002 at 00:04:50, Terry McCracken wrote:

>On January 20, 2002 at 23:43:21, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On January 20, 2002 at 22:02:10, Terry McCracken wrote:
>>
>>>Can anyone explain how and why a P-IV at 1.7 Ghz with 512MB (PC800) RDRAM
>>>outperformed an Athlon running at 1.4 Ghz with 266Mgh DDR Bus and 256MB of SDRAM
>>>on a Fritzmark by a wide margin?
>>
>>fritz might be in p3 assembly and has probably nearly no mispredicted
>>branches somehow. further it is such a small program that it hardly
>>needs data cache.
>>
>I'm not sure what you mean that Fritz is a small programme compared to other
>chess software? If that is so, then why is Fritz at the head of it's class
>compared to other commercial programmes most of the time wich you say need more
>cache and are larger programmes?

each node in fritz used to cost under 1000 clock ticks. right now
it's probably a bit less than 2000 clocks a node. In short it means
fritz is more busy with quantity than quality of a node. Some years ago
fritz was sold with next sentence: "fritz learns through search".

nowadays that is no longer seen as 'good', but i remember 1997 when
some major company was making PR by just quoting number of nodes. Search
depths or hashtables or search quality didn't matter. Only number
of nodes a second.

>>The 3 major disadvantages from the P4 are
>>  a) HUGE branch misprediction penalty
>>  b) very SMALL datacache
>>  c) no way to do 4 instructions a second according to

4 instructions a clock i obviously meant.

>>     experts who read the design, it can to at most 3
>>     instructions a second.
>>
>
>Well this was a P-4 vs Athlon, _not_ a P-3. So optmization for a P-3 would have
>no bearing in this case.

A misprediction at the P3 costs *at least* 10 clocks, whereas
most measure it to be practical more than way above the 'on average
15 clocks' which intel gives as average for a misprediction.

In 15 clocks you might execute 45 instructions.

Obviously branchmisprediction at the P3 and K7 are also important.

At the P4 to get a misprediction costs you: *at least*
20 clocks. Average branch misprediction penalty i didn't hear anyone
talk about but it will be more near 40 than near 20.

>I find much of the data about the P-4 at this site very
>suspect.

So it does make sense. P4 is a very new design which is released
too soon. With a bit more work on the P4 it might be a killercpu,
but right now it is a big waste of money for most applications.

>There appeared to be no serious branch misprediction, and it flew past the
>Athlon chip.

a minimum of 20 clocks is like deathpenalty, really.

>>>
>
>The Fritzmark for the Pentium was 749 and the AMD a mere 548! Why? This is
>>>contrary to the findings of this forum. That is a difference of 201, that is
>>>large!
>>>
>>>An explantion would be appreciated, thanks!
>>>
>>>Terry



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