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Subject: Re: IA-64 vs OOOE (attn Taylor, Hyatt)

Author: Matt Taylor

Date: 02:04:29 02/21/03

Go up one level in this thread


On February 21, 2003 at 00:49:18, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On February 20, 2003 at 20:10:58, Eugene Nalimov wrote:
>
>>On February 20, 2003 at 19:09:18, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>>
>>>It seems you know a lot more than I do about instruction latencies. How do you
>>>explain Crafty's disproportionate speedup on IA-64, then? And why would you
>>>think Crafty's performance is a good predictor of other chess programs on IA-64
>>>when Crafty is so much different from many other programs?
>>>
>>>Of course, all we have is Hyatt's word that Crafty does well on IA-64, although
>>>he's never seen it in person, and people who have seen Crafty run on IA-64 in
>>>person seem to contradict him...
>>>
>>>-Tom
>>
>>I saw Crafty on Itanium2 in person, and results were closer to what Bob reported
>>here than to what was reported here recently.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Eugene
>
>
>I have only seen _one_ bad Itanium2 report.  I have seen _two_ good reports,
>one from Eugene, one from someone inside Intel.  I have a problem with the
>Intel version because of the spec stuff I did and a NDA that is in force.
>
>However, there are other good 64bit results from the alpha 264 chip as well,
>factoring 800K from 600mhz would reach beyond 1600K at 1.25ghz, which is the
>fastest 264 I have seen.
>
>Eugene has never told me what he did to produce good results.  Nor do I know
>what Intel did specifically as I was not really involved and it was just a
>"heads up" from someone there about an interesting result.  Whether either
>(Eugene or Intel) tweaked the code I don't know.  I specifically know that Tim
>did not for the 600mhz 264 results I posted here, he compiled that code as is
>and ran it, without even testing to see if compact-attacks was better than the
>default or not.
>
>I don't understande all the 64 bit nonsense myself.  It seems pretty obvious
>that for 64 bit operations, they are going to be faster, _period_.  For 32 bit
>programs, who cares?  Sort of like benchmarking a non-vector program on a Cray.
>Of course it will not run very well.

Eugene reported 3M nps for single Itanium, right?

IIRC, my own results posted a while ago were about 1.6M nps in Crafty on a dual
1.67 GHz AthlonMP, so 800K nps at 1.67 GHz single-CPU. At 2 GHz, Athlon would be
roughly 1M nps. Itanium is faster then by a factor of 3 at half the clock speed.
Half the clock speed means it has equivalent theoretical IPS (6x1 GHz vs. 3x2
GHz). Assuming -all- ops were 64-bit and therefore Crafty derived a speedup of
2, that does not account for the additional gain which is rather significant.

Yes, Crafty will run faster on a 64-bit machine, but will it run that much
faster? Unless I have made some error, I don't see how the 64-bit machine word
could solely explain the speed gains on Itanium. I don't really know where the
extra speed came from. Maybe it's from the cache. Maybe Itanium comes much
closer to 6 IPC than Athlon does to 3 IPC. There are any number of explanations,
but I don't know because I have no idea how efficient IA-64 compilers are.

-Matt



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