64-bit Toys for Athlon-64? 82
gbulmash asks: "I'm looking to see just how much performance I can squeeze out of a new Athlon-64 system. This isn't for benchmarking, but more like you got a new car and you're looking for a long, straight road where you can push the needles into the red before letting off the gas (and then maybe a twisty mountain road to test cornering). Can the all-knowing Slashdot readers recommend some AMD-64 enabled/optimized distros and packages that will let us new proud papas of AMD-64 systems fully open up the throttle on these bad girls and see what they're made of?"
NAY! (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted, it's not gospel, but sound in theory.
64 bit chess (Score:1, Interesting)
Some chess engines represent the chessboard using "bitboards". A bitboard is where you use every bit in a 64-bit unsigned int to represent the state of a square on the board. To represent the whole board you use multiple bitboards... for example:
To get the location of white rooks you would and the two bitboards above together. You'd have to store black pieces, knights, bishops etc... in their own boards. You get the idea.So these programs tend to be a hell of a lot faster on 64 bit processors than on 32 bit machines because all this anding and oring can be done in one cycle rather than two.
One of the best free chess engines, crafty, is a bitboard program. So to answer your question - ftp a copy of crafty source code, build it with your handy dandy 64 bit amd64 compiler and run the benchmark command to see how fast it is.