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Subject: Re: Dual Opteron 248 - recommended or not?

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 12:58:39 11/18/03

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On November 18, 2003 at 15:22:51, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:

>Don't forget the Opteron is WAY faster running old 32 bit code too. You don't
>need 64 bit applications to take advantage of them.

I don't know about that. I've seen a lot of benchmarks where the Opteron just
edges out the P4 (faster, but not WAY faster). I've also seen some where the P4
edges out the Opteron, but they are almost always in the same ballpark.

The specint scores for a 2GHz Opteron and a 2GHz Athlon are not too far off
either. The Opteron scores were about 18-20% faster than the equivalently
clocked Athlon running Crafty, but the Opteron scores for 32-bit code were
compiled with the latest Intel C++ compiler (7 something), while the only Althon
2GHz scores they have were using Intel C++ 5 something. I suspect if both used
the newer compiler, the difference would be less than 18%, which is not WAY
faster.

How about Deep Sjeng? You posted your 64-bit numbers. Do you have any numbers
that would compare an equivalently clocked Opteron and 32-bit Athlon both
running 32-bit code? You still haven't told us if Deep Sjeng uses bitboards,
which makes it difficult to extract meaning from your 64-bit numbers. A 70%
speedup for a bitboard program is very nice, but a 70% speedup for a
non-bitboard program would really say something, considering Crafty only gets
about a 60% boost.

That is something I've been very curious about lately, whether a chess program
that doesn't use 64-bit values heavily (0x88, any array based program, etc.)
will get much of a speed boost on the Opteron compared to the fastest 32-bit
processors. Crafty is already faster than a lot of non-bitboard programs on
32-bit hardware. If it gets a 60-70% boost, while others get a 10-20% boost,
that's a significant blow to the non-bitboarders.



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