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Subject: Re: How many bits are mos efficient?

Author: John Coffey

Date: 23:11:02 09/30/98

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On October 01, 1998 at 01:58:58, Georg Langrath wrote:

>If 32 bits are more effective than 16, does this go on? I mean are 64 bits
>better than 32, 128 bits better then 64 and so on. What is the optimum?
>
>Georg


Effective for what?  It depends upon what you are talking about.

A 64 bit processor (with 64 bit data bus) can pull in twice as much
information as a 32 bit processor with a 32 data bus.  The more data
you can pull in then the more you can process in a single gulp.  Such
machines are designed to do operations in paralel, i.e, processing
2 32 bit instructions at one time or processing 4 16 bit instructions
at the same time.


Usually such processors have larger registers (i.e. 64 bit) so therefor the
native "word" of the machine being larger then you can do a bigger calculation
(such as for hash tables) in a single operation instead of taking sevearl
operations to combine two 32 bit numbers.   Right now 64 bits is a handy
number for chess games because the chess board has 64 squares.  Some bitboard
engines, such as Crafty and Darkthought, use several 64 bit numbers to
represent the state of the chess board, where each bit represents each square.

John Coffey



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