Author: Frank E. Oldham
Date: 14:35:56 04/20/05
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On April 20, 2005 at 14:41:49, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On April 20, 2005 at 12:33:24, Keith Ian Price wrote: > >> >>IBM recently came out with their Power-5 module: >> >>http://static.userland.com/weblogsCom/images/wallyswisdomwarehouseweblogscom/8XPower5MCM.jpg >> >>This module has 4 dual-core multi-theaded Power PCs similar to the ones used in >>the Mac G5. That makes for a total of 16 virtual cores, and IBM has a system >>that ties 8 of these modules together with a 4GB/s bus for a total of 128 >>virtual cores. The other four chips in the module are 4x36MB L3 cache. Since >>Crafty already gets about 1500 kns on a fast processor, and the mult-threading >>on a core offers about a 15-20% speedup, Crafty would likely exceed 100,000 kns >>on a full system, especially if the hash tables could be kept in the L3 cache. >>First, would it be possible to run a 128-thread version of Crafty? If so, do you >>suppose that IBM might be interested in affording you the use of one of these, >>as a Professor of Computer Science, to have a match against the self-proclaimed >>successor to Deep Blue? I imagine they would get some good publicity having an >>off-the-shelf IBM computer beat the specially designed chess computer in a >>match. What do you think? > >Hard to say. The "dual-core" part sounds good. The other part about what >appears to be a form of "hyper-threading" does not. HT for Crafty is actually a >losing proposition after the changes Eugene and I worked on (with AMD) for the >NUMA stuff last year. My dual xeon has HT disabled. > >But that aside, this could be a pretty powerful box. I've said all along that >the FPGA approach is not a particularly attractive approach considering what >could be done with an ASIC (ala' deep blue 2) vs a far slower FPGA solution. I >would not be surprised if later this year the dual-core boxes were able to >surpass the Hydra performance level, we will see... The SMT (hyperthreading) can be disabled -- they do this for some SPEC testing. On a single-core basis,, the POWER5 at 1.9GHz is about 10% slower than an Opteron at 2.5GHz on Spec Int type codes, but about 100% faster on Spec fp codes. And IBM will sell you 64 cores... Runs AIX or Linux 64-bit. My rough estimate is that crafty could enter the Deep Blue range of 100+ MNPS on a large config. Frank
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