Author: Eugene Nalimov
Date: 14:53:57 02/05/99
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On February 05, 1999 at 15:50:20, Dann Corbit wrote: >On February 05, 1999 at 14:52:07, Don Dailey wrote: >[snip] >>There are some companies selling these machines at reasonable >>prices, better than you might think. They can run Windows NT and >>Linux. Crafty would really scream on this machine. I don't know >>if Bob has an Alpha NT port or not, but there is a good chance a >>recompile of Crafty will do the trick. >There is an ALPHA NT version at my website. It is a single CPU compile, but it >is just a #define away from being an SMP version. If anybody wants me to build >an SMP version for the Alpha chip, let me know. We have an Alpha machine being >used in C.A.P. right now. If I did a port for our big ALPHA unix machine, we >might really see some performance. The Alpha NT machine we have is a pipsqueak >(old and not a very high MHz chip). > >>The big problem is how many >>programs will run on an NT Alpha machine? This I don't really know. >>But theoretically, it should be easy to port most NT software. >It they are in C, it should not take much. Especially if they are simply >Winboard engines. All you have to do is recompile it. It is almost always the >GUI stuff that is system specific. And if they already work on Windows 95 or >Windows NT, the port is trivial. > >>Programs like Fritz, which are developed with assemblers won't >>port without a huge effort so don't expect to see them. It's >>the classic tradeoff, if you want the most compatibility and >>comfort, you have to accept more performance constraints. You >>also have to face your fears, superior products usually die >>eventually because the lesser (usually lesser because it is OLDER) >>product is the one that has the most intertia and the most hype. >I would *really* love to try an EV6 machine with 8 cpu's running NT to see what >it could do. While the Alpha machine has native 64 bit integers for the >compiler, the OS is still 32 bit. I think a 64 bit port of NT will also be very >helpful. Tablebase and opening book I/O would be improved, for instance. Here I have Dell dual PII/400 and Digital dual Alpha 21164A/500. Based on my experience, those machines have almost identical performance - even on Crafty, which does a lot of 64-bit operations, Alpha is only marginally faster. My feelings are confirmed by SpecInt95. I know that 21164A is slower than 21264, but Pentium/400 is not the last processor from Intel, too. The real Alpha advantage lays in 64-bit pointers - it's ideal for huge databases. But not for chess, and not with 32-bit NT. Eugene
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