Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 08:41:36 09/07/03
Go up one level in this thread
On September 07, 2003 at 03:35:35, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote: >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. One note to dispel urban legend: "You do _not_ need a 64 bit O/S to run a 64 bit program." 64 bit support in the O/S helps some things, such as using a large memory footprint. But a program can execute 64 bit instructions even when running under a 32 bit O/S. Sun ran this way for _years_ on their ultra-sparc processors. > >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
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