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Subject: Re: 64-bit machines

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 07:44:22 02/08/03

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On February 07, 2003 at 08:09:23, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>On February 07, 2003 at 03:10:46, Matt Taylor wrote:
>
>>There is another subtle difference, too; IA-64 is heavily optimized in software
>>whereas IA-32 is heavily optimized in hardware. In IA-64 it is possible to
>>achieve rates closer to the theoretical 6 instructions per clock than it is on
>>IA-32.
>
>Possibly only because it runs at a much lower clock speed.
>
>>The IA-64 is probably extremely nice to compute with (6 MB L2 cache!!) if you
>
>Sort of. A 3GHz P4 outscores a 900MHz McKinely by 67% at SPECint2k, which is
>what's important for computer chess. McKinley is good at SPECfp2k. Maybe that's
>what you're referring to.

I have posted some Mckinley 1ghz numbers for Crafty.  It runs at about 1.6M
nodes per second.  No single-cpu PIV can come even close to that.  My 2.8ghz
xeon hist around 1.2M nps in a best-case...  And that is using hyper-threading
to go that fast.

I can't speak for non-64bit engines of course, but for Crafty, Mckinley seems
to be the fastest processor around, even if it doesn't clock particularly high.




>
>>Athlon64 will support all of these instructions. Yes, it is a waste when
>>significant portions of the CPU core are dedicated to MMX/SSE and no compiler
>>can generate MMX/SSE code, but an astute assembly programmer can write code for
>
>The Intel compiler can generate SSE2 (instead of x87) for floating point
>calculations. I believe gcc has library functions that make use of MMX.
>
>I wouldn't say MMX or SSE uses significant portions of the CPU core, relatively
>speaking. The difference between a Pentium and a Pentium MMX is ~1M transistors,
>and probably most of those were devoted to doubling the L1 cache sizes, not to
>MMX functionality. The difference between the Pentium 2 and the Pentium 3 (with
>SSE) is ~2M transistors. I guess you can decide for yourself if these numbers
>are significant.
>
>-Tom



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