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Subject: Re: What is right processor...

Author: Ricardo Gibert

Date: 16:48:15 03/30/05

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On March 30, 2005 at 18:18:28, axel binevskiy wrote:

>Pentium 4 is considered to be a top processor these days, so why is it not good
>for chess engines testing?...can not calculate moves in the right way or what???

Chess contains a lot of branches that are difficult to predict. The branch
misprediction penalty is significant ly higher with the P4. Read the section
called Branch Misprediction Penalty at

http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?article_id=15000186

An illustration of how this is manifested in a chess program like crafty can be
seen in the crafty section of cint2000 where the top Athlon 64 gets a 59.5 score

http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2004q4/cpu2000-20040920-03391.html

which is much faster than 73.6 for the top P4

http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2004q4/cpu2000-20041115-03597.html

The designers of the P4 made a trade off in order to produce a chip with a
higher clock speed. The tradeoff had its advantages and its disadvantages. Good
for some apps and bad for others. Chess is among the "others."





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