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

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 16:09:20 08/20/04

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On August 20, 2004 at 13:03:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On August 20, 2004 at 12:05:59, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>
>>On August 20, 2004 at 05:10:10, Tony Werten 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:
>>>
>>>Or that it's >> 512
>>>
>>>Basicly, this only proves that it's not between 256 and 512.
>>
>>That's not how cache works. By that rationale, you might as well not have any
>>cache at all. See my reply to Bob above.
>>
>>-Tom
>
>
>Tom, that is _exactly_ how cache works for some reference patterns.

I don't believe this pattern is an accurate model for a chess engine.

> See my
>reply to you above.  You don't yet have enough data to conclude anything about
>the working set size.  you might be right.  You could definitely be wrong.  At
>present, there is no valid way to say, based on running on two small cache
>processors.

Then let's design a way :)

For instance, say Crafty has a working set of 200 kB, try and add a dummy table
of 1 kB to your working set by looping through this at every node.

Now run the test again with increasing table sizes until you get hit with a big
slowdown. That's when you start serious trash caching.

Of course it assumes there's no trashing to begin with, but since Crafty is a
pretty fast searcher I don't think there are any big cache issues.

Granted there are a lot of small tables and they probably add to more than 256
kB, but I bet most of those are used only sparsely.

-S.



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