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Subject: Re: Why Does AMD out perform The Pentium Processor in Chess Only?

Author: Matt Taylor

Date: 19:08:26 12/31/02

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On December 31, 2002 at 18:33:16, Bob Durrett wrote:

>On December 31, 2002 at 18:19:53, Dan Andersson wrote:
>
>>First of all the AMD CPUs do not run at their PR speed. So comparing on
>>clockspeed alone the AMD is faster. Secondly I was referring to the statement
>>that the P4 is faster on all benchmarks. That is not true in the least. Not even
>>for games. That is the general conclusion. Thirdly some chess programs will run
>>faster on the P4. TSCP is one case. But it has a puny memory footprint and can
>>run in cache.
>
>You know what they say:  "Cache as cache can."  : )
>
>As mentioned before, it sure would be good if huge on-wafer caches were to
>become available and affordable.  Then all the engines and hash tables would
>load into the cache.  Maybe the term "latency" would become obsolete.

Pentium 3 Xeon chips were available with up to 2 MB of L2 cache. The Opterons
are available with 1 MB of L2 (L3?) cache. From what I read, Itanium currently
has 3 MB and Intel is going to put out 6 MB versions of the next IA-64
generation.

I doubt latency will ever become obsolete. Main memory grows much faster than
cache sizes do. Entry-level in desktops is somewhere between 256 MB and 512 MB,
and many machines come equipped with 1 GB of ram. A 2 MB cache is still small in
comparison. Personally I think the solution is to bring back on-board cache
memory, but I would prefer to see like at least 16 MB cache and preferably more
like 64 MB cache. Even if it's expensive, it would be worth it for high-end
machines.

-Matt



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