Author: Jeremiah Penery
Date: 21:03:18 11/29/99
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On November 29, 1999 at 23:08:30, Dennis A. Bourgerie wrote: >I am thinking about buying a notebook computer. There are different kinds of >processors on the market, for example, Celeron, K6-2, K6-3, Pentium, Pentium II, >Pentium III. I would like to get a notebook that can efficiently run Rebel 10 >or Fritz or other chess programs. > My question is: If the processors were to be ranked from best to worst how >would the list go? Also what other factors (maybe RAM or secondary cache) are >the most important for getting good results from a chess program? I will try to rank these: Celeron, PII, Pentium (MMX), PIII, K6-2, K6-3, Athlon (K7). In general performance (speed/MHz), it might go something like: Pentium, K6-2, K6-3/Celeron/PII, PIII (Katmai), Athlon/PIII (Coppermine). I'm not too sure about the position of the AMD processors above (except the Athlon). Many chess programs seem to favor them over the Intel chips, but some others dislike them. Supposedly they're also a bit flaky, especially when overclocked. The reason there are two different PIIIs is that Intel switched to a new .18 micron fabrication, which improves speed and reduces the die size. They also made the cache speedier and put, I think, 256k directly on the die. Pure CPU performance of the Coppermine chips over the older PIIIs is something like 40% greater, for the same MHz. (I.e., a 600MHz PIII Katmai is up to 40% slower than a 600MHz PIII Coppermine in pure CPU performance.) This is why they are now about equal with the Athlon in performance, where they lagged behind just recently. The Celeron has less L2 cache than the PII, but the cache runs at full core speed, rather than half that. For some programs, this can actually cause them to run faster on the Celeron. In general, though, the Celeron is just slightly slower than the PII. One advantage is that Celerons (at least older ones) could very easily and safely be overclocked greatly. As far as other factors that affect a chess program: RAM is very important. Hash table size does have some affect on the strength of the program, however small. Some programs also seem to use the hash table better than others. Crafty, for example, performs very similarly with anywhere from 4MB to 384MB of hash tables - the size doesn't seem to affect it very much, as long as it's above some threshhold (I don't remember what the threshhold was, but it was pretty small.) Other programs, like Fritz, seem to depend on getting hash tables as big as possible. But in ANY system, the more RAM the better. There really isn't much else that affects a chess program. RAM and processor speed are the only major factors in determining strength, but other things will also help very slightly. A decent video card is always good. For those programs with all the 3D graphics, it will take some load off the CPU - More CPU time for the chess engine. A fast hard drive can also help, especially if you have TBs being accessed or something. There, a slow hard drive can kill you. Otherwise, it probably won't matter much.
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