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Subject: Re: 450 Xeon or 300 PII? --- Real numbers for Go (not Chess)

Author: Dr. Gregor Overney

Date: 18:57:51 11/22/98

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On November 22, 1998 at 19:03:26, Kevin Mulloy wrote:

>Good evening gentlemen!
>     I have a question:  I currently own a 200 MMX Pentium 80 megs of RAM.  I am
>in the process of upgrading to a new machine before Christmas.  I am looking at
>a 300 PII (66 mhz bus - 128 megs of RAM) and a 450 Xeon (100 mhz bus - 128 megs
>of RAM).  Using a heavy calculating program (MCP7) I see that my current machine
>calculates about 1,250,000 positions per minute.  Could anybody out there tell
>me what kind of performance gains that I might be able to expect using the 2
>machines that I am looking at.  Cost is a factor, but if the Xeon should give a
>dramatic performance gain, I would go with it.  Thanks in advance for your help.
>                                     Trapper

Part of the SPECint95 test is 099.go (go-playing program). At least for Crafty,
the performance in 099.go and Chess are quite linear (exceptions apply for
multi-processor systems). So here are the numbers:

SPECint95 ---- 099.go  ---- from http://www.microprocessor.sscc.ru/performance


Chip               L2/L3 Cache          Performance index (higher is better)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
PII/300            512 KB                 10.8
PII/450            512 KB                 16.4
PII Xeon/400       1 MB                   16.3 (estimated 18.3 for 450 MHz)
Alpha 21264/575    4 MB                   29.4
Alpha 21164PC/533  1 MB                   11.4


I would consider to buy a dual PII/450 (not Xeon!) with a 440GX Supromicro
motherboard. Crafty runs excellent on multi-processor systems (just in case you
are using Crafty). Xeon's are just too expensive for single and dual processor
systems. Xeon's are usefull in large servers with four or more CPUs.


Hope those numbers help you a little bit. Check the above mentioned Web-page for
more informations about performance.

Gregor

PS: For Chess using bitboards, the Alpha will bring you an additional
performance increase since bitboards just fit into 64 bit.







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