Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: SSE2 Instructions and hash key calculations

Author: Dezhi Zhao

Date: 08:45:32 09/03/03

Go up one level in this thread


On September 03, 2003 at 10:34:52, Anthony Cozzie wrote:

>On September 03, 2003 at 09:47:07, Dezhi Zhao wrote:
>
>>On September 03, 2003 at 09:07:13, Anthony Cozzie wrote:
>>
>>>On September 02, 2003 at 16:52:24, Dezhi Zhao wrote:
>>>
>>>>Hi!
>>>>
>>>>I know that some programmers here have played with MMX/SSE/SSE2 quite a lot. I
>>>>am wondering if the new SSE registers and xor op can beat the regular registers
>>>>in calculating the hash key that are 64 bit operations. Have anybody tried this?
>>>>
>>>>Regards,
>>>>dzhao
>>>
>>>  Generally speaking the 64 bit mmx/mmx2 operations don't help chess programs
>>>because mmx is on the floating point pipe; to transfer data between the integer
>>>& floating point pipes is something like 5-10 cycles each way; or if you go
>>>through memory you have store-load stalls of a similar amount.  Plus, the
>>>regular integer pipe is actually pretty fast at bitboard computations because 2
>>>32bit ANDs can go down the pipeline together.
>>>
>>
>>Please note that the new 128 bit xmm registers are in a seperate file, and you
>>do not need the emms instruction for SSE stuff.
>
>none of which impacts anything that i said.

OK. But with SSE you have less overhead than MMX.
And using one or two xmm registers will help reduce register pressure.
I know the regular xor operations are fast. However you need at least two 32-bit
registeres to handle a 64 bit integer. When the hash calculation code is embeded
into probe code, you may end up with register spill over.

>
>>>  It only makes sense if a significant amount of work is being done, like in
>>>Gerd/Steffan's floodfill routines for example.  Computing the hash key is a
>>>*very* cheap operation: two (maybe 3) times per make_move, lookup a 64 bit table
>>>value and XOR.
>>>
>>>anthony






This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.