Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: PowerMac G4 -- Good for chess ?

Author: Rajen Gupta

Date: 05:21:53 10/19/99

Go up one level in this thread


On October 18, 1999 at 21:38:14, Ray MacFadyen wrote:

>In an australian magazine there is a story about the new Powermac G4,it says it
>is a 128 bit machine that can calculate one billion floating calculations per
>second and is reported to outperform the pentium 3 600 by roughly three times.
>Does anyone know anything about this machine,would it be three times as fast for
>chess programs.
>My next question is slightly off topic,I hope no one is offended,in australia
>3 months ago 64 megs of sdram was $80,it has now risen to $250,an increase of
>over 3x,is this happening in the rest of the world and if so what is the reason
>for it.
>Hope someone can answer these questions.
>Ray MacFadyen

Reply:the new mac processors have what are called altivec instructions
(analogous to the Piii -SIMD and AMD -3d now instructions)if you have software
written to take advantage of these you could a tremendous speedup, otherwise
not.so far only some graphic applications can benefir from these.
Memory prices have gone through the roof but sit tight , in a few months they'll
be right down again.

rajen



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.