Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 06:38:15 05/11/02
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On May 10, 2002 at 22:06:04, Jeremiah Penery wrote: >On May 10, 2002 at 15:46:11, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: > >>I gotta see that hammer on my desk first, be able to feel it and touch >>it and then run it and see it is faster, before i believe they have >>made a 64 bits processor kicking the other 64 bits processors like McKinley >>or a cheap K7 0.13 > >I suppose you've been able to 'feel and touch and run and see it is faster' for >a McKinley? No, I didn't think so. If you've read up on it, you might guess >that it probably will not be very good for things like chess programs - its >strength is in Floating-Point. As far as Hammer beating a 'cheap K7 0.13', what AMD is developing a new space shuttle. Intel already had one. Intel wanted to let it run at 1.2Ghz and above. Now it starts at 1 Ghz, NOT at 1.2Ghz. IA64 had numerous problems and a long development cyclus. You don't need to be hardware expert to read the specs of the Hammer and know that AMD is going to have major problems to meet that. And only when the design team managed to produce something, then we know whether it is going to be a fast CPU. Also they need a hell of a compiler. That's a lot of conditions before it is fast. More realistic is to expect that after it is released, that only the cpu after it they will have learned a lot and it will be fast. Whether a mckinley is going to kick ass i do not officially know obviously, but on paper it's awesome and it's not a first generation cpu like the hammer is. So with regard to 32 bits, the hammer isn't going to have major problems, but with regard to 64 bits i doubt a lot. Now let's suppose they make a fast 32 bits cpu with some 64 bits extensions that work. How fast is the 64 bits then? Obviously very slow. Whatever they do, in order to get *any* program use the 64 bits parts, they need a special compiler for it. It's so many 'if then else' problems that it's even for a major company like AMD not going to be easy to be fast soon. If we look to the K7 MP cpu then i would swear to you as a layman here that it is for chess so fast because of the L1 and L2 cache strategies (and how they behave parallel). A huge and fast and very good L1 cache. An outstanding L2 cache which over the chipset can get data without asking the main memory first. Let's not focus upon the technical terms. For a 64 bits cpu to be interesting for chess they need to do something no one ever has managed before. If they manage i would be very amazed. Realistically the 64 bits instructions will not help computerchess anywhere as they will be slower than other chips doing 32 bits. The real interesting thing is their approach that it is pretty cheap to build big supercomputers from the chip. Not the execution speed of the cpu will be impressive when compared to other chips, but the number you can put in parallel. Just like intels IA64 isn't impressive from computerchess viewpoint, but the fact that it is a highend chip, THAT is impressive. Now the new chip from intel might be very fast a Mhz. In fact it could challenge for programs like diep the fastest K7 perhaps, depending upon branch prediction penalty. We will see! >would possibly make you think it wouldn't? For running the same 32-bit >applications, the Hammer is very similar to the current Athlons, except it will >have much better memory speed, since it has the memory-controller on die. It >also should have more cache than the current Athlons. For 64-bit applications, >it should be even faster, of course.
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