Running Reversi on Multiple Platforms

I have made little changes to let the xversi-c to play by itself. Get a copy of the benchmark version now xversi-c-benchmark-v0.1.tgz with binaries for Linux x86 or x86_64 included. It basically sets evaluation level to 6, so that it will run for a while. I first run it on my PC, surprisingly, the 64bit version is running much faster.

Host: AMD64 X2 4200+ (2.2GHz)
Compiler: GCC 4.1.1 64bit
Time 3m0.532s

Compiler: GCC 4.1.1 32bit
Time 5m7.210s

Before running this, I thought applications that do not use 64bit data types extensively probably would not benefit from running in 64bit mode. I have yet to investigate the exact causes of this performance difference. I do hope you can shed the light for me if you are experience in this. :)

See performance of the same program on other platforms, you probably will find another surprises.

Host: Itanium II 1.5GHz
Compiler: Intel(R) C Itanium(R) Compiler for Itanium(R)-based applications Version 9.0 Build 20050430 Package ID: l_cc_p_9.0.021
Time 6m35.306s

Host: Itanium II 1.4GHz
Compiler: Intel(R) C Itanium(R) Compiler for Itanium(R)-based applications Version 9.0 Build 20051201 Package ID: l_cc_c_9.0.030
Time 7m16.698s

Compiler: GCC 4.1.0
Time 6m8.471s

Host: Intel Core Duo 1.83GHz
Compiler: GCC
Time 5m5.423s

Host: Intel Pentium 4 HT 3GHz
Compiler: Intel(R) C Compiler for 32-bit applications, Version 9.0 Build 20051201Z Package ID: l_cc_c_9.0.030
Time 5m7.080s

Compiler: GCC 4.1.0
Time 4m37.404s

It's quite impressive to see that Intel Core Duo is on par with the Pentium 4 HT 3GHz, considering the clockspeed difference. And the GCC 4.1.0 is actually outperforms the Intel compiler v9 quite significantly. However, I didnt try out all the compiler switches in Intel compiler. On all the platforms, I merely use -O3. Regarding Itanium II, they are famous with their floating-point performance. In this case, that does not apply, as evaluations merely use Integer operations. In addition, Itanium II has lower clockspeed than other platforms. With higher clockspeed, it will probably work faster than other platforms.