Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: If hiarcs can port to mac os then why can't others??

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 07:12:05 01/07/05

Go up one level in this thread


On January 07, 2005 at 10:06:47, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On January 07, 2005 at 08:12:23, Steve Coladonato wrote:
>
>>On January 07, 2005 at 02:43:29, Richard A. Fowell wrote:
>>
>><snip>
>>>Porting a full program (GUI and all) is a big project - when
>>>Chessmaster 9000 was ported to the Mac this year, it took six
>>>months longer than originally announced.
>>>
>>Is not the Mac OS Unix?  And if so, why not a port to Linux?
>>
>>Steve
>><snip>
>
>Not at all. Mac OS is a development based upon (free)bsd. That is very

==> Mac OSX i mean of course to be clear. Not the older selfdeveloped operating
system that apple developed themselves.

a problem of freebsd used to be it has no good multithreading capabilities. All
threads run at 1 processor. Not at 2.

Now that is not a major problem for apple as their users are typical not highend
users.

Yet the G5 is not so bad like most people guess it is. It is only 'relative'
bad. Bad if you calculate the price per chessposition a second it sees compared
to other systems. So for those paying bigtime the G5 is pretty fine. G5 is a
lowend version with very little cache and higher clocked than the power5 from
IBM.

Power5 is very impressive for floating point. But very poor for integer work. In
fact it is so poor they don't even test it at integer workloads.

The sad part is that there is AFAIK no quad mac's. Only duals you might be able
to buy and i haven't heard of multicore g5's either, despite power5 being
multicore having a lot of cores per cpu. So the speed of power5 is based upon
something the g5 doesn't have AFAIK.

the g5 is nowhere benchmarked. Yet those cache eating benchmarks are not so
important for chess. For chess raw performance of the cpu integer is important
and latency to L1 cache and branch prediction penalty and throughput from L1 to
cpu. The rest matters a lot less.

Vincent



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.