Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Sempron vs. Athlon 64: Proof that Crafty's working set is < 256k

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 15:51:37 08/20/04

Go up one level in this thread


On August 20, 2004 at 17:52:58, Eugene Nalimov wrote:

>On August 20, 2004 at 04:33:07, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>
>>Now that AMD is selling two processors that are identical other than L2 cache
>>size (Sempron has 256k, Athlon 64 has 512k) we have proof of Crafty's working
>>set size:
>>
>>Sempron:    1,080,020 NPS
>>Athlon 64:  1,080,230 NPS
>>
>>http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2170&p=3
>>
>>This should prove once and for all that Crafty's working set is < 256k and
>>therefore that size of L2 cache has no effect on its performance (as long as
>>it's >= 256k) and that main memory speed likely plays a trivial role
>>performance-wise.
>>
>>I bring this up because of all of the long debates that have occurred in the
>>past about the value of L2 cache, the speed of memory, and the working set size
>>of chess programs.
>
>If you remember, several years ago I run the similar experiment. I benchmarked
>Crafty on 900MHz Itanium2 with 1.5Mb of L2 cache, and on 900MHz Itanium2 with
>3Mb of L2 cache.
>
>I don't remember exact numbers (I posted them here), but the 3Mb cache was
>faster by (I believe) 10%.
>
>Unfortunately that did not answer original question, as CPUs have not only
>different cache size, but also different cache associativity. 1.5Mb was 6-way
>associative. 3Mb was 12-way associative.

How big a hashtable did you use?

If you used a very small hashtable and a relative large cache wouldn't you
expect a significant part of the HT to get cached?

I think it would, because usually when running with a very small hash the nps
actually increase.

If instead of decreasing the TH size one increased the cache size the effect
would be equivalent I think.

Perhaps it's best to turn off the hashtable entirely when testing for the
"working set", otherwise there's no telling how hashing disturbs the
measurement.

-S.
>Thanks,
>Eugene



This page took 0 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.