Building A Homemade Chess Supercomputer 282
nado writes "There's a new article on Chessbase.com which has
GM John Nunn showing you his chess-orientated PC upgrade to a double Xeon system, with some Fritz benchmarks." Elsewhere in the article, John Nunn discusses the unique computer needs for chess computation: "One of the problems with currently available processors is that they are not particularly well suited to the integer calculations used for chess. A Pentium 4 will be slower at chess than a Pentium 3 of an equivalent clock speed."
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
I've got no chance.
Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Great! (Score:2)
Re:Great! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)
All your rank are belong to us.
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know about you guys... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I don't know about you guys... (Score:4, Funny)
"learn damnit, learn!"
Joshua: "...the only way to win, is to not play the game"
:)
Tic Tac Toe? (Score:5, Funny)
Sincerely,
W.O.P.R.
To paraphrase a well-known signature: (Score:5, Funny)
P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:4, Insightful)
AMD isn't so innocent (Score:2)
How long until: Backport GNU/Linux, now with the Linux 0.2 kernel it's 1.00000001 times as GNU as the SCO-encumbered 2.4 kernel Debian GNU/Linux.
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:3, Informative)
Although the longer pipe does allow for ramping of clock speeds higher then before (part of the reason AMD added 2 more stages to the Opteron and by association the Athlon64) it needs to be complemented with a more efficient branch prediction algorithm.
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Like this delicate game of chess, Intel's next move is uncertain. While the P4 has what is needed to smoke the Athlon for years (just as long as they keep tweaking the predication engine and improve on branch prediction's accuracy), it can't really compete with Opteron. Neither can Itanium. Intel just hasn't invested enough in the future since they were ruling the present. I even read somewhere that they had started Williamette and Itanium (forgot the codename) at nearly the same time back in 95? but neither really caught their supervisors eyes since they were more than profittable already. So in short, Intel's game of chess has been too passive for too long. And it's not time to look back on the P3 and say what is good... the P4 is something completely new, like the pentium one was so long ago. Give it some time and it will vastly out perform the P3 comparitively, but you have to realize that the P3 is something like 6 years old, and the Athlon even older than that.... It's time people stop trolling on how past processors were faster comparitively and move on to making the new processors faster. Borrowing from the old is ok.. Look at Banias for example.. but we seriously need to worry about the future more. But thanks for trolling on by.
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:2)
The codename for Itanium? I think it was Merced. And McKinlye for Itanium 2.
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:5, Interesting)
-B
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:2)
COuld Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Japanese sports cars have small engines, which rev really high. These are hightech, powerful and sought-after technologies. The P4 is analagous. American and European sportscars have large, slow-reving, high-torque monster engines which are also powerful and sought-after. This is analagous to the Athlon. They have been leapfroging eachother for years now in performance - each has a different but equally valid way to get there.
It is true though, that the customer only sees clockspeed (RPMs in my analogy) - which tends to help Intel. This does NOT however make it an inferiour method of acheiving performance.
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course there's always the notion that we should be using asynchronous logic now, anyway; That logic has sped up to the point where it is not actually important to have everything happen on the same clock, but instead more useful to have it occur as rapidly as possible.
As for your automotive analogy, the primary reason that it seems that doing things the Japanese way is practical is that you keep the weight down, which is good from the standpoint that your handling improves and you simply have less weight to push around. On the other hand, a large engine need not necessarily be heavier than a small one. The primary advantage today (it seems to me) is that it ends up being cheaper on gas to run the smaller motor, but of course the more power you use, the more fuel you throw down the thing. Larger cars can be much lighter now than they used to be, though, what with aluminum getting cheap and high strength steel being readily available, not to mention that monocoque technology has moved along nicely with all this computer modeling.
Anyway aside from that digression; I don't think either company really has the win here, just like small engines and large engines are interesting for different reasons, though you can certainly get more power out of larger engines... It only becomes more expensive at a certain point. Of course, Intel's processors are artificially expensive, simply because people pay for them; AMD's are as well, though to a lesser extent. Silly analogies :(
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Japanese sports cars a small and have little engines because Japanese men are small and have little engines. European sports cars... well, have you seen the size of those Germans? They need bigger cars with large engines and lots of torque to shift that amount of lard down the autobahn.
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:2)
Raw clock speed can make up for a deficiancy in efficiancy. I don't like it, but I have to conceed. Why else are all the top machines in maximum PC P-4 3.2 Ghz w/ dual channel DDR 400?
However, for me, an additional issue comes into play. I am also concerned about price.
To bring it around to the car analogy again, I could take my $5000 used honda accord and drop another $6000 into it, and thus roughly equal my brother's TransAm, in price and horsepower, which he paid $11000 for. I.e. I c
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:3, Funny)
(I know you were joking)
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:3, Insightful)
The P4 handily outperforms the P3. It is irrelevant that it does so partly by running at a higher clockrate.
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:2)
That's what caught my eye right off, the statement in the blurb makes it sound like this is some kind of fluke, but it's not. That's true for any application, not just the chess board. I'm not gonna get into the argument about whether it was just 'marketing' or not - there are *some* technical justifications, but it's a well known fact to anyone that pays attention to this sort of thing that the PIV is vastly inferior to the PIII at the same clock speed, and that the virtue of it's design is in being able t
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me use the converse of your argument. AMD redesigned their chipset to make their IPC too high and to hell with performance.
Why do people insist that high frequency automatically means low performance? I'd say the P4 is pretty damn fast.
It does not matter if the frequency is high or low. If you get the performance, who cares if the frequency is 1GHz or 4GHz? There are lots of ways to go for performance - 2 extremes are "narrow-and-fast" and "wide-and-slow".
Nobody complained when Alpha went for low-ipc/high-frequency designs. Students of computer architecture will remember the days in the early 90s when there was a contest between the "speed-demons" and the "brainiacs". HP built the 'brainiac' machine (which was lower in frequency but had a wider issue) and Dec (Alpha) went for the 'speed-demon' (faster clock, lower-ipc). History shows that Alpha won that particular battle (performance-wise, not market-wise).
Getting higher IPC is hard. In fact, making a superscalar, out-of-order machine wider is really hard. The hardware cost and power grow as the square of the width. Getting higher frequency is hard too, but some believe it is not as hard as getting higher IPC. The cost of the hardware and power of a higher frequency machine grows linearly with frequency.
Yes, the P4 is designed to clock higher than an Athlon. They use fewer gates-per-clock and therefore, necessarily do less work per clock. Unfortunately, performance is not measured in work-done-per-clock. It's measured in absolute time. So if you can get the same amount of work done in the same amount of time, but use more clocks to do it, why should you as a user care? You still got the performance.
Performance != speed (Score:2, Informative)
Unfortunately, performance is not measured in work-done-per-clock. It's measured in absolute time.
Not always. Performance may be measured in main loop executions per hour, but sometimes it is more useful to measure main loop executions per megajoule (speed vs. energy consumption; there are 3.6 MJ in 1 kWh) or main loop executions per cubic meter hour (speed vs. rack space). And if increasing work done per clock can increase the rate of work done for a given amount of electric power or rented rack space
Re:Performance != speed (Score:3, Interesting)
Performance, as I have it defined in my head is simply the time it takes to complete a task. The lower the better. For this guy's chess application, I think he is more concerned with absolute performance irrespective of total energy consumed.
Your definition includes power efficiency as a consideration. This is a worthy metric that is not lost on the engineers at Intel and AMD - let me assure you. There's a very talented team of engineers in Haifa, Israel building v
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:5, Informative)
That's not insightful, that's dumb.
There is no great difference in performance between the AthlonXP and Pentium 4 lines. The small difference that exists is largely due to platform specific optimizations in the specific software benchmarked. That's relevant in the real world, sure, but it's not a measure of raw perfomance.
I don't think that it is in dispute that Intel went for low IPC/high clock at least partly because it was seen as good for PR -- with the MHz-race and MHz-myth and all.
It's with some humor we now see them back-peddle as they try to sell their high-performance low-energy processors which is clocked much lower than the P4s, but like the AthlonXP-line, have a higher IPC.
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:2)
And so the million dollar question is:
Why buy one over another?!
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Price, specific apps and current platform. (Score:2, Insightful)
Price (as mentioned) and performance in specific applications, if applicable.
"Current platform" is of course also a big reason to stick with one or the other when upgrading, though that might be a little bit more relevant for people upgrading on the Athlon-line, since AMD stuck with SocketA for a long time while Intel enjoyed going from Slot-1/whatever to SocketX/Y/Z forcing motherboard replacement between processors.
Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed? (Score:2)
There absolutely is no truth to the rumor that Intel went for high-frequency/low-ipc designs for marketing reasons. Don't believe me? Look at what an AMD employee says [google.com] (he used to work for Intel on the P4).
Should this have been said? (Score:3, Insightful)
"A Pentium 4 will be slower at chess than a Pentium 3 of an equivalent clock speed."
That's too easy to be distorted
I'm sure a marketing group or some such, for intel competitors or even PPC, will say
"A Pentium 4 will be slower
And then use it to justify their own means.
Hmmm?
Re:Should this have been said? (Score:2)
Re:Should this have been said? (Score:2)
reader rebellion (Score:5, Funny)
As this computer was to be focussed on chess, video performance was not important.
Hardcore Slashdot Games readers cringe...Re:reader rebellion (Score:2)
special purpose hardware (Score:5, Informative)
Re:special purpose hardware (Score:2, Insightful)
But if you can include special purpose chips (ASICs) in any comaparison, then general purpose processors won't be the best at any single task. An ASIC can be made for any program that can be written, and it'll run that program faster than any CPU made by the same process.
For instance: want to know what is the best CPU for performing matrix multiplication? An ASIC. What's the best CPU for rendering 3D images? An ASIC (like the ones used in modern video cards - they're ASICs of a sort). Wha
Re:special purpose hardware (Score:2)
Deep Blue had 480 special-purpose chess CPUs [muldermedia.de].
Processor features (Score:5, Funny)
Just imagine the chess performances of a 8086 at 1GHz. And you get a space heater too, for those cold chess-playing winter nights
Re:Processor features (Score:2)
Re:Processor features (Score:2)
Of course that might be pure masturbation, the question is, what would it cost to do that and are there any cheap CPUs which are fast enoug
Re:Processor features (Score:2)
No it doesn't beg the question. Begging the question has got nothing to do with suggesting a follow up question, statement or thought. Read up on what it means, you won't look silly if you use it in conversation that way.
Re:Processor features (Score:2)
[OT]Re:Your proof (Score:2)
I dont give a shit what those links say. The literal meaning of "begs the question" is what he said, and what he ment. Whatever those links say have NOTHING to do with any of it.
PPro/P2/P3 should have best IPC (Score:2)
Since P4's have such a high frequency, it is impossible to still do everything as fast in terms of clock cycles. As far as I know, most non-vector integer applications run slower on a P4 than a P3 at the same clock frequency.
If newer pc's aren't well suited for chess... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If newer pc's aren't well suited for chess... (Score:3, Informative)
Been there, done that. See The Chess Variant Pages. [chessvariants.com] It lists about a hundred chess variants, some of which are three dimensional, and has links to places where you can download software to play variants (commercial and otherwise). The site has an apple [chessvariants.com]
FritzMark (Score:4, Insightful)
Software to examine chess games would be a perfect example of the major performance improvements to be had with multi-threading. A new thread per processor, with each thread examining different possible move paths, would give dramatic speed gains.
Re:FritzMark (Score:5, Informative)
Re:FritzMark (Score:3, Informative)
"Deep Fritz is the multi-processor version of Fritz7, which leads the world ranking list since four years. Deep Fritz 7 will run in computers with between one and eight processors. On a dual system the increase in speed is around 85% compared to a single processor of equivalent speed. But even if you have a single processor system the playing s
Re:FritzMark (Score:2)
Re:FritzMark (Score:2, Interesting)
Therefore, chess programs try to estimate the best moves, based on attack patterns and history. They are quite good at this and take a correct estimation for the best move in most cases.
This means that adding processors/threads
That CPU comment looks stupid. (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, the whole point of the P4 is to rev up the clockspeed, so there are not and can not be any "equalent" P3s available (excepting early versions of the P4 which are way obsolete today anyway and irrelevant to the problem at hand)
Secondly, the Athlons are well known for their stellar integer performance, so who'd use P4s when high IP is needed?
Re:That CPU comment looks stupid. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That CPU comment looks stupid. (Score:2)
The P4's have double ALU's for this purpose alone; turn on HT and integer performance improves drastically.. but float point suffers because their FPU's aren't nearly as efficient at HT, yet. So think of it as having 4 processors instead of two for this case alone.
Arguably though, Athlon's wouldn't be a bad choice either, but since you can't use thermocom
Re:That CPU comment looks stupid. (Score:2)
the pentium4 has a very deep pipeline. It is very hard to keep this pipeline full under normal circumstances. Most OS's are multitasking, and juggle many tasks on one CPU, causing large amounts of overhead for task switching in the scheduler. The fact that the CPU is hard to keep full and that the scheduler has to do lots of overhead work to give each task enough CPU time lays a path to a new idea: Hyperthreading...
The idea is to put a second frontend on the
And those are two very BIG reasons, too... (Score:3, Funny)
From America in 2003, where you damn well better DIY or DW (do without). Then, write it up and sell it as a big 'hint'...
It comes as no supprise that he used Dual Xenons (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It comes as no supprise that he used Dual Xenon (Score:4, Interesting)
See my earlier post, asking how old FritzMark is, because the article says that it only uses one processor - ie: It's not a multi-threaded app.
Re:It comes as no supprise that he used Dual Xenon (Score:2)
Theoretically, a dual processor machine for chess WOULD be twice as fast as a single processor machine, unlike in normal tasks where dual doesn't mean double.
Not so fast there, sonny. On a dual processor machine, there's still a single main memory which has its own bandwidth limits. The cache does hopefully alleviate some of the pressure on the pipe, but probably can't relieve it all.
You'll see the memory bandwidth limit in a lot of other applications that seem like they should be theoretically doubl
Re:It comes as no supprise that he used Dual Xenon (Score:2)
there is a cheaper solution... (Score:2, Funny)
XP vs 2000 in the application (Hyperthreading) (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyways, since I am using linux 2.4, two hyperthreaded Xeons look like four processors to the box, I"m sure it's not the same performance of for seperate processors, but I'm hopeing it's at least slightly better then two non Xeons
The writer of the article wrote that for Windows he prefers 2000 over XP. I am curious if XP (or Linux 2.4) and thus Hyperthreading might help his already built computer with a bit more performance...
Re:XP vs 2000 in the application (Hyperthreading) (Score:5, Informative)
This is due to the fact that hyperthreading is still limited to the number of functional units in the processor. For code that is very intensive on a particular type of unit (int or fp), you basically end up with a stall condition on the virtual processor while all the functional units of that type are used by the first processor.
Hyperthreading is better suited to cases such as a user using a 3d modeling program and a MP3 player. The MP3 player will hopefully end up on one virtual processor and use the int units while the 3d modeling will end up on the other and use the fp units. This would allow both to run in parallel on the same processor.
So, if you are using a very int or very fp intensive, multi-threaded app, turn off hyperthreading. If you are a typical user running many programs that use both int and fp, then turn it on.
Mac attack (Score:4, Interesting)
Seconds before G3, G4 or PPC970 is mentioned:
3...
in soviet russia... (Score:2, Funny)
the computer... (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be cheaper to use Athlons XP? (Score:2, Funny)
And, in other news ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me get this straight: he didn't select a purpose-designed processor, he didn't even do a survey of available processors (forget including non-Intel architecures) to see which would give him the best integer performance for the task, he doesn't consider chipset, he doesn't consider memory architecture, he's willing to accept one hardware-caused crash per month, he seems to think that configuring a machine and having his brother put it together is "building" one, and thinks that a purpose-built machine should be able to accept the OS and data (read: disk contents) from a previous machine without hiccough. While perhaps interesting to the chess afficionados, I fail to see the relevance on Slashdot.
Why are we seeing this article instead of something on any one of the serious chess machines? Why is this article more newsworthy than, say, Anandtech or SharkyExtreme or Tom's Hardware's pick for the baddest machine you can currently build? Just because a Grand Master did it?
To be fair, I have great respect for anyone who can attain the Grand Master level -- that's something I'll never do in my lifetime. He's clearly shown tremendous talent and devotion to chess, and my hat is off to John Nunn for that. But he's a computer harware expert? A supercomputer architect? Are we at the start of a new series of Slashdot articles on computers of the Rich and Famous? What's next, diet tips from RMS? Health advice from Linus? The EFF Cookbook?
Re:And, in other news ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Tierce
So why didn't he get ECC memory? (Score:3, Interesting)
My home desktop machines both have ECC memory. I never open the boxes. Haven't had a crash on either the Windows 2000 machine or the QNX machine in over a year.
Re:So why didn't he get ECC memory? (Score:3, Insightful)
While he's got him on the phone, he should ask the vendor where he can get one of these "equivalent" Pentium III's. I didn't know PIII's came in 3Ghz these days.
The whole point of the differing Pentium 4 architecture is that it scales well with clockspeed; and with the introduction of Hyperthreading on the newer chips, The P4 has really come into its own as far
Re:So why didn't he get ECC memory? (Score:2)
So you've gone a year without a crash. Big deal.
I've got a number of dual-proc P3 systems in a rack that have gone for 3+ years without a crash, and not a one of them has ECC. In that time, they've been shut down about 3 or 4 times to move them and for kernel upgrades. I've also got an NT4 machine that hasn't crashed in about 4 years, it's been shut down twice - each time, to be moved to a different building.
Now, don't get me wrong - when something's critical, I do use ECC. But NOT using ECC isn
Warning: (Score:2)
Valuable advice to
why is it? (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, for number crunching and math and calcs, the mac seems to rule close to the top...
just my 2cents
Re:why is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I expect this might be a different picture tomorow, with the much rumored anouncment of the G5@2GHz.
The p4 is slower at everything (Score:2)
Damn! (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, those Pentium 4 Xeons are slow!
Build from scratch -- HAH! (Score:2)
Your idea of building completely from scratch is to buy a pre-made motherboard and bolt on a few other pre-assembled components. Your concept of from scratch has certainly varied from what I would consider that concept to entail.
freechess.org (Score:2, Interesting)
I play free internet chess at the Free Internet Chess Server. Find them at...you guessed it: www.freechess.org [freechess.org].
All you CLI guys out there will love the fact that using a graphical client is optional! For those of us who are sane, there are a handful of graphical boards available to complement the irc-ish interface that allows people to find opponents.
It's fairly popular already, but I sure wouldn't mind a bigger crowd...cause all the guys on there
Look to SPECint2000 for fast chess machines (Score:5, Informative)
Intel D875PBZ motherboard (3.0 GHz, Pentium 4 processor with HT Technology) scores 1137
ASUS A7N8X Motherboard rev. 2.0, AMD Athlon (TM) XP 3200+ scores 1324
You'll find that P6 derivaties (Banias, Athlon, Opteron etc...) do better on this benchmark. There are lots of unpredictable conditional branches in this application, so the incidence of mispredictions is higher than normal. You would think that this is the main contributer to poor P4 performance, but actually that is a second order effect, because the predictor on the P4 is far better than on other machines. It's the fact that the code will not fit inside the trace cache, but will fit nicely within Athlon's 64KB I-Cache.
Re:Look to SPECint2000 for fast chess machines (Score:3)
crafty is not a bad program. It's one of the best amateurs out there. Certainly it's not as strong as Fritz, but so what? You could say that about >95% of all chess programs. Only someone who doesn't know what they're talking about would call it a bad program.
It's too bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
That the software doesn't (seem) to exist to use a cluster instead.
No, really, this isn't one of the "imagine a Beowolf of these..." posts. Here's my point: For the cost of just one of the *processers* that he bought, you can build an *entire machine*, happily running an AthlonXP 2700+. An ENTIRE MACHINE. So, for the cost of the two processers, you've got two machines. For the cost of the SuperMicro motherboard and chassis, you can build two MORE machines. With the cost for the rest of the stuff, there's a fifth machine thrown in to boot.
So, what will be faster - a dual 2.8 GHz Xeon, or 5 AthlonXP 2700+ machines? My money's on the cluster, for this particular application. The Xeon machine has 533 MHz of total memory bandwidth, split between two processers, effectively 266 MHz each. The AthlonMP systems, with 333 MHz each, would have a combined bandwidth of 1,665 MHz - about three times that of the Xeon system.
To make it better, the Athlon is MUCH better than the P3 OR the P4 for integer work, which makes me wonder why he would choose the P4 in the first place. Furthermore, not only does the Athlon do much more in a clock cycle than a P4, you'd have a combined clock speed of 10.8 GHz with the Athlons instead of the 5.6 GHz of the Xeons. Twice the clock speed, AND more work per cycle!
Now, of course, being able to actually USE that clock speed would be dependent upon actually transmitting the messages back and forth, and efficiently dividing the work between the machines. In this sort of situation, where for any one point in time, there would be a great deal of possibilities to compute, it would seem like it would divide up very well.
steve
Using FPGAs to really speed things up (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"ORIENTATED" IS NOT A WORD! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"ORIENTATED" IS NOT A WORD! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm checking my 1974 edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary right here, and on page 494, it clearly states that "orientated" is the past tense of the verb "orientate".
I suspect that you mistook the intended verb to be "orient", with a past tense of "oriented". However, when reading the sentence, one will clearly see that "John Nunn" is the subject of the sentance, and the the "PC" is the subject, with "chess" being the indirect object, upon which the "PC" is oriented towards.
You are completely correct that a subject is oriented towards a direct object.
However, as I understand it, a direct object is orientated towards an indirect object, by a subject.
Re:"ORIENTATED" IS NOT A WORD! (Score:5, Funny)
In your third paragraph you misspelled "sentence" as "sentance" the second time you used it.
Sincerely,
Spelling Nazi
Re:"ORIENTATED" IS NOT A WORD! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:supercomputer? (Score:2)
Though I do doubt if quality chess software is on the platform yet.
Re:Only Chess? (Score:2)
And you forgot to say "game" funny.
Re:P4 vs. P3 (Score:3, Informative)
First of all, the P4 is quite superior at doing tasks that are very mundane and repetitive. So simulators, counters, anything that performs the same operation on multiple data sets time and time again run very well on the P4.
Secondly, with branch prediction, the P4 out races competitors at some computer games, especially those that are optimised for P4 use. Branch prediction is very helpful also in the field of doing anything
Re:P4 vs. P3 (Score:5, Informative)
Especially true with RDRAM, which has tremendous throughput but horrible latency.
The classic example of something the P4 is very good at: encoding frames of video into a compressed format such as MPEG-2. It's just cranking away through a big heap of data in a linear fashion.
Secondly, with branch prediction, the P4 out races competitors at some computer games,
Athlons do branch prediction, too. And they have a lower penalty for failure since their pipelines are shorter.
Branch prediction is very helpful also in the field of doing anything more than once because it knows what to expect next, and preps the processor for it.
What?!? Um, actually, branch prediction just keeps the chip's pipeline full. Branch prediction doesn't magically adapt the P4 to process data better, it simply allows the P4 to keep pipelineing instructions after a conditional branch. When a prediction is wrong, it must be backed out, which is expensive... but most of the time the prediction is good. (For example, a loop that does something 1000 times will have a conditional branch that will branch the same way 1000 times in a row, and then branch the other way the 1001th time. The prediction would be wrong that 1001th time, but would be correct for most of the other 1000.)
especially those that are optimised for P4 use.
It is hardly surprising that a P4 would do better than an Athlon at running P4-optimized code. However, this isn't a useless point, because Intel is the 800-pound gorilla and there are games optimized for the P4, and none for Athlons.
But AMD isn't about innovation, they are about making money plain and simple. Instead of making engines that try to predict the next move, they just built their processors with the very minimum everything, strapped on a few extra math units and away we go. This technique is very fast, but it's also expensive as most AMD users have learned, because all those extra adders do is add a LOT of ambient heat as the processor clocks up.
Actually, if you check the Thermal Design Power specs for equivalent-peforming AMD and Intel chips, the AMD chips run cooler.
So the P4 was for the mainstream user, to help spare some time from the physics boundry of the processor technology, and to improve on the things we do most on our computers today (music, videos, games).
Pure revisionist history. The P4 was designed for super high clock rates. They ripped too much stuff out of the design, so the P4 has some bad weaknesses it didn't need to have. That's why it's so critical to optimize code specifically for the P4 -- if you don't work around the flaws in the P4, it really hurts.
The Athlon, while it gets more work done per clock than the P4, isn't perfect. Its biggest problem is that it is physically very easy to destroy: you can fry it, or you can even crack its die trying to install a heat sink. The P4 with its heat spreader is much tougher, and with its built-in thermal throttling is more robust. AMD has learned its lesson, though, and the Opteron is robust.
Intel has aggressively marketed the P4 as The Multimedia Chip, but really an Athlon or a P4 will do well for multimedia stuff. The Opteron, for some specific kinds of tasks, will crush either one, and for other kinds of tasks will be slightly faster. I'm just guessing -- I haven't run benchmarks -- but I suspect that the Opteron will do very well on chess.
steveha
Re:huh? (Score:4, Funny)
RTFA and LATFP (look at the fucking pictures).
Re:Go (Score:2)
It's interesting to note that Go seems to be a much harder game for a computer to be good at.
Re:fp about Go in a chess article! (Score:2)
Re:fp about Go in a chess article! (Score:2, Funny)
What struck me, as I read a freeBSD post, was the complete lack of trolls and crapflooders. Everything was like "Score: 3 it is interesting". The lowest was 0 for all the AC posts.
In a way it was both refreshing and disappointing. I had been looking forward to babelfish trying to cope with goatse and "
Re:fp about Go in a chess article! (Score:5, Funny)
I am not popular at chess clubs.
graspee