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Subject: Re: Dual Core G5

Author: Hristo

Date: 09:00:29 11/03/05

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On November 03, 2005 at 11:32:54, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On November 02, 2005 at 22:48:53, Hristo wrote:
>
>>On November 02, 2005 at 18:02:59, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On November 02, 2005 at 16:23:36, James T. Walker wrote:
>>>
>>>>On November 02, 2005 at 16:19:03, John Dillard wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On November 02, 2005 at 15:34:30, Joshua Shriver wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>http://www.apple.com/powermac/
>>>>>>
>>>>>>nice :) would make a good quad system.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>-Josh
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>They're making a quad system.  There's not other system on the market today,
>>>>>super computer or otherwise, that can process as many gigaflops of info as the
>>>>>dual core G5.  I just wonder if any of the chess programs will benefit from this
>>>>>power?
>>>>
>>>>I know really nothing about computers super or otherwise but I suspect that 76
>>>>Gigaflops on the quad core is not faster than the fastest supercomputer of
>>>>today.
>>>>Jim
>>>
>>>I'm not even convinced that 76 gigaflops is doable on any microcomputer today...
>>>
>>>Seems like a _BBBIIIIIGGGGGGG_ stretch...
>>>
>>>basically one floating point operation every 13 picoseconds or so...
>>
>>Bob,
>>it actually works-out to be about "right" at that speed. The clincher here is
>>the algorithm and the domain, i.e. required output. At work we (software) had a
>>contest with the hardware dudes, who were using FPGAs (and what-have-you) ...
>>and outcome was that in some of the cases (less than %20) the G5 won against the
>>best FPGAs you can buy.
>>
>>Best Regards,
>>Hristo
>>
>>p.s.
>>The Apple claim is easily verifiable because you can download their example
>>applications and test it for yourself; FIR, FFT work very well under Altivec.
>>The problem, obviously. is that this speed doesn't apply to every problem
>>(situation).
>
>I had not looked, but suspected that the altivec stuff was the key.  It is
>always possible to find some algorithm, and specific data set, where a
>particular hardware instruction set really works well.

Indeed. This is exactly what Apple is selling, without actually telling people
that this type of performance cannot be achieved in %95+ of the algorithms.

> My old "attack" code on
>the Cray boxes was the only actual working piece of code Cray knew of that
>executed from start to finish with zero wait states of any kind (waiting on
>memory reads, waiting on the output of a previous instruction, etc.)  It only
>took a couple of years of twiddling to reach that point.  For a piece of code
>that represented less than 10% of the total execution time after it was
>completed...  :)

Yep.
Today most people prefer to achieve practical results rather than maximum
theoretical performance of the given hardware; after all we live in the age of
Java. :-)

Best Regards,
Hristo



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