Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: PowerMac G5

Author: Steven Edwards

Date: 13:39:57 04/27/05

Go up one level in this thread


On April 27, 2005 at 12:11:33, Matthew Hull wrote:
>On April 27, 2005 at 12:04:58, Tord Romstad wrote:
>>On April 27, 2005 at 11:29:07, John Sidles wrote:

>>The PowerMac G5 is an awesome machine, but if the "ultimate desktop chess
>>computer" is what you are looking for, you should look elsewhere.
>
>Unless someone could figure out how to use the vector processor for chess
>knowledge.  Bob did that on Cray machines, but the "altivec" type processor is
>probably much more primitive and less flixible than the Cray.

I spent some time with this a while back.  Unfortunately, AltiVec (a
coprocessor, really) doesn't have any instructions that are of interest to a
typical chess program.  It could be used for storing the entire AttackFrom
bitboard array (exact fit, actually), but there is a relatively high time cost
moving values between AltiVec and the rest of the CPU.  AltiVec is rather fast
moving stuff back and forth to memory however, and that's a big reason that
AltiVec machines have such high PhotoShop benchmarks.



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.