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Subject: Re: Checkers: Las Vegas and Chinook

Author: martin fierz

Date: 12:43:49 09/17/02

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On September 17, 2002 at 01:30:27, Dave Gomboc wrote:

>On September 16, 2002 at 14:25:06, Dave Gomboc wrote:
>
>>On September 16, 2002 at 03:45:03, martin fierz wrote:
>>
>>>oh - too bad! i'd have been interested - i'm sure chinook would have solved this
>>>faster than my engine, but i'd have liked to know how much faster. i've found a
>>>problem in my evaluation which hurts in this particular position - i'll have to
>>>try and fix it. thx for trying anyway!
>>>
>>>aloha
>>>  martin
>>
>>I will ask again when it is done.  The code is being upgraded to allow the use
>>of the 10-piece tablebases.  (Not all of them are generated yet, but it can use
>>the partial set that has been computed.)
>>
>>Dave
>
>Oh, one more thing, Martin.  I asked about the processing power of the SGI
>machine that was used in 1994-95.  Jonathan told me that he got about 100K
>nodes/second, and we (back-of-the-envelope :-) figured that the ballpark
>Intel-based PC equivalent to that hardware is about a Pentium (I) 150 MHz.  So I
>underestimated with single-double digit megahertz, but Pentium III 1 GHz is way
>off the mark too.
>
>Dave

did i say 8x150MHz? my memory :-(
here's something from the chinook website:

"In the Challenge, Schaeffer had found a first-class vehicle for his driver.
With its sixteen CPU's, each of which can perform 150 million instructions per
second, Chinook would be able to consider, in a single minute, 12 million
possible directions in which the game might evolve."

so according to that it's 200kN/s. i have no idea what kind of processors were
in that challenge, and what kind of speed a single one of those had.

here's something about a pentium I:

"Byte magazine (May 1993) noted that the Pentium had a MIPS (million
instructions per second) rating of 112 at 60 MHz or 1.85 MIPS/MHz. This compares
very favorably (about 2-1/3x time higher!) with the 0.8 MIPS/MHz rating of the
earlier 486DX, although we must keep in mind that MIPS is not an accurate
pedictor of real world CPU performance."

MIPS is not a good indicator, but the challenge would have had
16x150 MIPS = 2400 MIPS, which, according to that pentium tech talk above, would
be equivalent to a 1.28GHz P1. if i throw in a factor of 2 for MIPS inaccuracy,
i still get 600MHz.
of course, that's only the "processing power", which in a 16CPU environment gets
hurt by parallelization...

aloha
  martin



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