Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto
Date: 18:42:19 08/06/03
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From the texts you gave, the removal of the 2GB limitation basically means that the programs will be able to use larger hashtables. Most people won't have 2GB now, but RAM is still getting cheaper and cheaper and I see many desktop systems now with 1GB. Most servers are already in the multigigabyte area. So that's one limitation that will disappear. The most interesting thing is the change away from the x86/IA32 architecuture, which is over 10 years old now. It supported only 8 32-bit registers. The Opteron has 16 64 bit registers, which is a lot more comfortable for the programmer, and allows programs to run faster because they become less dependant on L1/L2 cache and RAM. (Intel's IA64 has even more, but IMHO it's unusable for manual optimization, you're too dependant on the compiler). The 64 bit registers open new possibilities to toy with larger datastructures and get good performance, be it bitboards, or anything else that works on 64 bits at a time. Furthermore the Opteron has a huge cache (1M), incredibly fast memory access, and seems to scale very well in an SMP setting. All stuff that's very beneficial to chessprogram performance. -- GCP
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