Author: Eugene Nalimov
Date: 15:51:15 02/05/99
Go up one level in this thread
On February 05, 1999 at 18:27:42, Dann Corbit wrote: >On February 05, 1999 at 17:53:57, Eugene Nalimov wrote: >[snip] >>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. >What about 6 piece tablebase files and 100 million position opening books? >The greatest advances will come from things of that nature, unless some >fundamentally new algorithm is invented. > >So the Alpha should be good for chess, given a 64 bit OS. I don't beleive *any* current machine (let alone Cray or some 1000-CPU animals) will handle 6-man tables in a near future. Even if you'll write generator in a better way than mine was written (I made some design decisions that simplified it, but slowed it down and/or increased its RAM usage), it'll still work for a month to generate simple pawnless TB. Size of the TB will be ~55 time larger than for average 5-man TB. 10Gb for single TB (or 100Gb for complete set - including one TB with pawns and all promotion cases) will be too much for a reasonable machine in the next few years. I agree that after those years Alpha will be better suited for handling of those huge resources than x86. But I still beleive that Intel will resolve its problems with IA-64, as it resolved problems with CISC that many beleived will forever harm x86. Or that something else will happen. Five years is a very long term when you are talking about computers. Eugene
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.