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Subject: Re: OT: Affordable new 64-bit Power4 boxen from IBM

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 14:15:07 06/25/02

Go up one level in this thread


On June 25, 2002 at 09:07:27, Vincent Lejeune wrote:

>On June 25, 2002 at 08:56:04, Adam Oellermann wrote:
>
>>On June 25, 2002 at 07:54:35, Vincent Lejeune wrote:
>>
>>>On June 25, 2002 at 05:09:04, Adam Oellermann wrote:
>>>
>>>...
>>>>As I understand it, the Power4 blows the doors off Itanium2 for integer
>>>>performance. So a dual for approx $20000 and a quad for approx $30000 would
>>>>represent an *immense* amount of chess for your money. Me, I'd love to see
>>>>Crafty on one of these guys clean up ICC... Of course, while it's dreamtime, IBM
>>>>have 32-way boxes with 1.4GHz Power4 CPUs
>>>>
>>>>Cheers
>>>>Adam
>>>
>>>Bob, would you compare the speed of such computer and the one who run Cray
>>>Blitz, please ?
>>
>>Surely the differences in the architecture/purpose between a 64-bit SMP Unix box
>>and a Cray must fill any honest comparison with weasel words. I am sure there
>>are some things which the Cray would do much faster; some the big IBM boxes
>>could probably compete. I would ***guess*** that the Cray would run Cray Blitz
>>faster, but a 32x1.4GHz Power4 would run Crafty faster; Cray Blitz taking
>>advantage of unusual features of the Cray, with Crafty being more suited for
>>"general-purpose" computers.
>>
>>Disclaimer: I've never even seen a Cray up close, and therefore defer to just
>>about anyone who might have an opinion on this :)
>
>My question was a bit unclear, I just would to know the comparison, in
>Nodes/secondes between  "CrayBlitz on cray" and "Crafty on such machine" :)


For the Cray T932, selling at $60,000,000 when new, Cray Blitz could search
about 7M nodes per second using all 32 processors.  Divide 32 into 7M and you
get about 200K nodes per CPU, roughly.  An equivalent Itanium2 or PPC4 ought
to run at way over 32M nodes per second, assuming you could get a 32 node
machine and that it is based on shared memory rather than message-passing like
the SP machines...



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