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Subject: Re: Why is P4 less efficient than Athlon (or P3) for chess programs ?

Author: Bo Persson

Date: 00:09:03 07/04/03

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On July 03, 2003 at 12:27:20, Ernest Bonnem wrote:

>Does anybody here know the (somewhat detailed) technical reason ?
>Chip architecture ?
>
>On the average, for chess programs, a P4 running at frequency F is equivalent to
>an Athlon at frequency F times 2/3.
>Actually, it seems that this 2/3 ratio is no longer as bad for hi-end P4 (3.06,
>3.0 GHz) or the Mobile Pentium : any confirmation and reason ?

Intel marketing specifically wanted it to be this way!

They had a problem with AMD Athlon catching up on the PIII, even reaching 1GHz
ahead of Intel, so they demanded that the P4 should be designed to run at the
highest possible clock speed so that they could continue to claim "The Worlds
Fastest Processor".

So now the P4 has reached 3 GHz, while the Athlon is just above 2 GHz. How do
you do that? By doing less work during each clock cycle, you can make the cycles
shorter! If you just do 2/3 the amount of work, you can do that 3/2 times as
often.


Bo Persson
bop2@telia.com



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