Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 03:20:18 03/03/00
Go up one level in this thread
On March 03, 2000 at 03:28:02, Francesco Di Tolla wrote: >But Pentiums already had several units on the same die, actually the Pentium was >a sort of two 486 integer units on the same die. >Pentium II/III have even multiple FPU units as far as I know. At a broad conceptual level, the Pentium has two 486s glued together. The problem is that the 486s are running the same program. They grab one instruction each and try to do them at the same time. But instructions often depend on each other, so they can't be done simultaneously. This design is called "superscalar." It increases performance by (maybe) 50%. It's possible to put two complete 486s on the same chip. If you run one program, it will run on one 486, and you won't get any speedup from the second 486. But if you run two programs, they each get a 486, so you see a 100% speedup. Chess programs can take advantage of extra processors, so if you put four simple processors on one chip, it would probably run a lot faster than just having one big processor. -Tom
This page took 0.01 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.