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Subject: Bitboard engine speed difference on different processors

Author: James Robertson

Date: 17:35:35 04/17/03


Out of curiosity I tested just the move generation and basic board functions of
my bitboard chess program on several different computers. My home computer is a
Pentium 933mhz, and the other computers I used were Athlons in the 1.6ghz range.

My program's move generator runs at roughly the same speed on both systems. I
was surprised and tested using several different compilers (VC5, VC6, .NET,
gcc), under Windows and under Linux. To compare more easily, I wrote a simple
non-bitboard move generator and tested this on all of the machines. The speed
differences scaled with the speed of the processors, which seemed logical.
However, I still cannot explain why the bitboard functions are so much slower on
the faster computers. The only difference I can see is that my home computer is
a pentium and the others are athlons.

It seems strange that this would make such a large difference. Can anyone give
any reasons why? I used no assembly, just C/C++ code, with all the default
compiler options on all tests.

Thanks,
James



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