Author: Nolan Denson
Date: 17:59:09 11/08/02
I was in a seminar today for hyper-threading. A demonstration was put on to explain how it actually works. What I found out is very interesting and I am wondering if a chess program can be designed or with a little tweaking can take advantage of it. As many of you know that hyper-threading takes advantage of the operating system by making the system think there are twice as many processor. So here is my explanation it’s a simpler way that explains the situation. System (A) has 1 processor running task ... the cpu hands off the info to a register that executes that operation. So while the processor is waiting for the register to do its thing ... it’s losing valuable time by waiting. So with hyper-threading we throw in a second cpu, which basically performs the same task as the first cpu. All seems great until you both cpu's are trying to send info to the same register. So then we get the big slow down with hyper-threading. So how can we improve on that ??? Answer By having multi-tasking applications. So basically in our situation above .. the application is what needs to take advantage of hyper-threading ... that way both processor are busy ... one processor could be doing one part of the chess program and the other another part. So multithreading chess programs will have a problem and multi-tasking will see the speedup. Now what I am wondering is such a thing possible for a chess program? Can a program like crafty take some of its threads and do something else that doesn't use the same register's? Can a chess program take advantage of hyper-threading, by becoming more like a multitasking program that still uses multi-threads also ??
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