Re: [gnugo-devel] Parallelizing GNU Go

[Evan Berggren Daniel]

On Fri, 4 Apr 2003, Dave Denholm wrote:

> Paul Pogonyshev <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > Dave Denholm wrote:
>
> > > Depending on what happens with hyper-threading...
> > > Also depends on whether gnugo is cpmpute bound or memory bound.
> >
> > i believe it's mostly memory-bound, but who knows :) hyper-threading might
> > become a good reason for going threaded but it is not at the moment 
> > certainly.
> >
>
> Hmm - if it really is memory bound, then running two threads might
> be *slower* than one thread on a multi-cpu machine : memory
> thrashing may dominate.
>
> ie if there is not enough memory bandwidth to satisfy one cpu, then
> making two cpus fight over the same bus is doomed !

My guess would be that GNU Go is bound by memory latency, not CPU cycles
or memory bandwidth.  Therefore, running it on an SMP machine would work
fine, and it might even get a noticeable improvement from a HyperThreading
machine.

Evan Daniel