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Subject: Re: Pentium 3 + 4 Speeds for Chess Programs

Author: Bo Persson

Date: 00:08:45 06/25/03

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On June 24, 2003 at 17:32:43, Joachim Rang wrote:

>On June 24, 2003 at 13:33:23, Mike Hood wrote:
>
>>In the article recently posted on Chessbase's site John Nunn points out that for
>>applications that use a lot of integer arithmetic (like chess programs) a
>>Pentium 4 is slower than a Pentium 3 at the same clock speed. This is news to
>>me... can anybody please quantify this by giving in percent how much slower it
>>is. Either by references to web pages or the results of your own experiments.
>>
>>This could help me in my next computer purchase. My finances are limited, so one
>>of my options is to choose between a fast Pentium 3 and a slow Pentium 4.^
>
>A Pentium 4 achieves about 70% of the performance of a P3 or Athlon with same
>MHz.

That's because Intel specifically designed it to run at higher clock speeds that
the Athlon. You have to give up something to reach 3 GHz, like the amount of
work done for each clock tick.

>So the speed of a Pentium 4 with 3 GHz is equivalent to the speed of a P3
>or Athlon XP at 2.1 Ghz (Athlon 2600+).

But the PIII design will never let it run at 2 GHz. It does too much work for
each clock tick, if you clock it up that high it will stumble.

>For chess Athlon is still the king of
>the hill and much cheaper. Since a year the heat problems have also gone. So buy
>an AMD or better wait a few months and by an Athlon 64 (which is according to
>some posts a real beast for chess).

Or take a look at the new Power Mac G5 with dual IBM 64-bit processors!  :-)

http://www.apple.com/powermac/

>
>regards Joachim


Bo Persson
bop2@telia.com




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