Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Opteron 64 bit makes kn/s 100% better(faster?)??????!!

Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto

Date: 00:35:35 09/07/03

Go up one level in this thread


On September 06, 2003 at 23:03:31, Sietel Monic wrote:

>I was on playchess.com and a opteron user said his dual 2.0 ghz's doubled
>compared to a dual 2.0 ghz athlon mp's..... is this have any truth?? He's
>looking at 4,800 kn/s on deep fritz 7!!!! thats more then most quads!
>I do relize you couldnt have this kn/s with df7 because it's not 64 bit capable
>but such programs like deep sjeng or crafty will be this much imporoved???

For Deep Sjeng, an Opteron 2.0Ghz would be as fast as an Athlon XP 3.4Ghz,
*when running in 64 bit mode*. Also, the Opeteron is much better optimized
for a dual configuration as the Athlon is. Given this, doubled performance
may be possible.

But note that playchess implies he was running Windows, so he cannot have
been using a 64 bit version.

So it's unlikely that it was true (twice as fast as an Athlon), but it's
not entirely impossible either.

>Im confused by all this 64 bit thing. Can someone shed some light on what
>exactly 64 bit does, and what it may do for chess. I always thought it just >uped the cache memory so it thus made things faster since info travels much
>much less time then from memory chips. So very bad at keeping up with
>technology...

The main thing is that it is easier to work with very large databases,
but this is not very relevant to chessprograms. What is important is that
the Opteron can do an entire 64 bit calculation at one time, whereas old
chips needed to do 2 x 32 bit calculations to get the same. Also, the
Opteron uses a new instruction set with more registers, which can make
calculations even more efficient.

It's not only 64 bits, the Opteron does away with some limitations of
the old x86 Intel design while still running old code extremely fast.

--
GCP



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.