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Subject: Re: [Q] What is Genius' speed?

Author: fca

Date: 06:43:39 08/11/98

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On August 11, 1998 at 08:14:32, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On August 11, 1998 at 08:06:36, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>
>>Aside from software differences, the Pentium MMX/200 has a 66MHz L2 cache
>>(possibly smaller than 512k) whereas the Pentium II/300 has a 512k 150MHz L2
>>cache. If a program really bangs on the L2 cache, it will go much faster on the
>>Pentium II.
>>
>>Cheers,
>>Tom
>>
>>On August 10, 1998 at 22:23:46, fca wrote:
>>
>>>I am puzzled, Uri.
>>>http://www.rebel.nl/bench.htm shows the P2/300 about 50% - 60% faster than the
>>>P200MMX for Rebel.
>>>Intel benchmark pages ( SPECint (base)95 ) give +80%.
>>>While obviously different programs benefit by different amounts by CPU upgrades,
>>>your figures show +150%  which is a huge difference!
>>>Any ideas?
>
>
>Besides Tom's comment about Cache, there are other issues.  The original pentium
>had a serious design flaw in the pipieline that would let one pipe stall far
>more than necessary.  This was corrected in the MMX versions.  Also the original
>pentium had a horrible bug in branch prediction, and would perform poorly on
>programs with lots of branches (A chess program typically falls in this category
>because of all the if...then...else... cases in the evaluation.  The MMX also
>fixed this bug.
>
>So such a big jump on a poorly-behaved program

Ah - so Junior is poorly behaved, but Rebel is not?  Hmmm.... :-)

> is not a surprise.  The typical
>benchmark program is much better behaved than a chess program, with far fewer
>branches, and more regular memory references.

Of course.

> Chess programs are pretty bad
>actors and stress hardware...

Please recall the big difference was between +100% per Uri (+150% adjusted down
by say 20% because no F5 shell:  +150% == 2.5x,  2.5x less 20% = 2x , 2x == +
100%) and the +50% per the Rebel benchmarks.  This is not primarily a cpu
benchtest vs chess program argument therefore.  It is a Rebel vs Junior one!
Why such a big difference (if cache is not most of the answer)?

  this is one reason that it seems that Crafty is
>going to be in the new SpecInt98 benchmark... it will be the first 64 bit
>integer program and the first non-numerical algorithm that will really stress-
>test compiler optimizers...

So I can load SpecInt98 and play the Grob?  ;-)

Kind regards

fca



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