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Subject: Re: How Much Difference Does the OS Make?

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 10:31:39 11/11/02

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On November 11, 2002 at 13:24:31, Bob Durrett wrote:

>I guess the comparison I was fishing for was:  Chess engine operating under a
>dedicated operating system versus chess engine operating under a commercially
>available [general-purpose] operating system.

For a chess program to get maximum speed, it would have to BE the operating
system (so it owns the process(s) 100%), and when you look at these numbers I
posted, you would get a few extra minutes every 6 hours, or something like a 2%
speed up, which is worth nothing in practical play.

Actually, you wouldn't even get that much of a speed increase, becase the "few
extra minutes" were not Windows, but applications, such as Internet Explorer,
MSVC++, Windows Explorer. "System time" is 23 seconds out of 6 hours and 50
minutes (now). So if your chess program ran for 7 hours, it might get an extra
30 seconds of search time, and that is absolutely worthless. That comes out to a
0.1% speed increase.



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