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Subject: Re: Chess benchmarks on PIII coppermine ?

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 01:12:20 12/07/99

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Intel says a lot about how many registers the "Itanium" has, but they only make
a small fraction of them available to the user. The design is supposed to be
really great because when it gets to a branch, it can start working on both
paths while the branch condition is still being evaluated. You can imagine this
sucks a lot of registers...

(I'm just repeating some secondhand information. I could be totally wrong...)

-Tom

On December 06, 1999 at 08:39:37, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On December 05, 1999 at 20:31:41, Jeremiah Penery wrote:
>
>>On December 05, 1999 at 19:41:00, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>
>>>On December 05, 1999 at 12:59:09, Werner Schuele wrote:
>>>
>>>>Can anybody post chess-benchmarks for PIII 600E or PIII 650/700?.
>>>>I wonder if Athlon or PIII is the better chess-processor.
>>>>Thanks
>>>>Werner
>>>
>>>Athlon is a gift from heaven.
>>>
>>>It's 15.5% faster than a PIII for DIEP,
>>>and i can only pray that a dual and quad motherboard for it
>>>gets out real soon and competes with intel in such a way that
>>>quad motherboards get cheaper, yes even octo motherboards...
>>>
>>>Note that celeron is also quicker than PIII, about 7.2% for DIEP,
>>>but parallel of course it doesn't get near that, it's about
>>>as fast as a PIII for the parallel version of DIEP, so when
>>>talking about parallellism, please let the dual boards already come
>>>from AMD... ...especially now that a 1 Ghz AMD is available (kryoteched
>>>cooled and overclocked SuperG stable at 1 Ghz, see www.kryotech.com)
>>
>>Have you tried Diep on the Coppermine PIIIs, as opposed to the Katmai ones?  I
>>saw benchmarks (from PC Magazine or something...) where the Coppermine was up to
>>40% faster in raw integer/FP calculating speed than a Katmai PIII at the same
>>speed (MHz).  This is due to a number of factors, which I won't go into now...
>>With the Coppermine, the PIII is just as fast as the Athlon.
>
>Wherever i look, i can't find a single dealer which has a coppermine
>available. This is like saying: wait for the k8 to come out. Let's
>get real and clearly distinguish between processors that we can buy
>and processors that get out one day.
>
>Note that intel promised till few months before it was available
>that Katmai would be 15-25% faster than a PII, yet for integer instructions
>it appeared to be 100% the same as the PII. Let's relax and wait for the
>coppermine to get introduced and then draw some conclusions.
>
>For now my favourite 2 processors are the K7 and the 21264.
>
>Note that from AMD i wasn't given any details how their branch prediction
>works, in contradiction to dec-alpha for the alpha 21264 which seems to
>have a superb form of branch prediction. Took AMD 1 month to reply to
>an email of mine. It's a 2k big table that's all i know.
>
>The penalty for a misprediction is *at least* 10 clocks at AMD,
>so a clock more than what PIII does give. So being 15.5% faster than
>a PIII for DIEP is theoretical kind of weird.
>
>Except for the 21264 which does 4 instructions a clock, they all do 3
>instructions a clock.
>
>The interesting details list to know from any CPU for chessprograms:
>   - #instructions a clock
>   - number of integer registers (merced gonna have 128!!!!!)
>   - L1 code/data cache sizes
>   - L2 speed and size
>   - new form of branch prediction (hopefully copied from dec alpha?)?
>   - #entries for Branch prediction table (512 only for the PRO/PII/PIII).
>   - smallest delay for a branch misprediction
>   - 64 bits?
>
>Expected speedups for possible changes assuming the processor is a PIII
>and then gets next projected on DIEP on a new CPU with just one change:
>
>If a CPU does 4 instructions a clock instead of 3, then that obviously
>should speed up roughly 30%.
>
>More registers kick butt bigtime (unlikely that
>intel changes this till the merced comes out as this would require new
>compiler and incompatibility with current software), but i have no
>idea how much it would speedup my program.
>
>making L1 cache from 32 kb to 128 kb gives nearly 10% speedwin.
>Speeding up the L2 cache to processor speed (doubling in speed), about 7%
>speedwin (if both L1 cache gets bigger and L2 gets faster then i guess total
>speedup is less way less than 17%).
>
>new form of branch prediction (let's take the alpha branch prediction)
>i can only guess here bigtime: 25% speedup?
>
>increasing BTB (branch target buffer on intel processors) or branch
>prediction table from 512 to 2048 ==> 10% speedup.
>
>If hardly delay for branch mispredictions i'd
>expect my program to get 2 times faster...
>
>Getting a 64 bits processor is interesting to know for Bob,
>not for DIEP though.
>
>What i don't have are these details for the SUNSPARC processor.
>For crafty this processor sucks bigtime, even though it's a 64 bits
>processor.
>DIEP isn't fast either on these processors, though it's not that slow.
>a 300Mhz sun performs like a 233Mhz PII for DIEP nowadays or a bit
>faster than a pro200Mhz. At the sun i used gcc 2.95.1, and considering
>this compiler is at intel processors around 8% slower than the visual
>compiler, that would make the sun look like a bit better:
>==> 233 x 1.08 = 252Mhz PII which means that a PII at the same Mhz is
>less than 20% faster.
>
>Vincent



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