This improves the speed of NNUE by a bit on old hardware that code path
is intended for, like a Pentium III 1.13 GHz:
10 repeats of "./stockfish bench 16 1 13 default depth NNUE":
Before:
54 642 504 897 cycles (± 0.12%)
62 301 937 829 instructions (± 0.03%)
After:
54 320 821 928 cycles (± 0.13%)
62 084 742 699 instructions (± 0.02%)
Speed of go depth 20 from startpos:
Before: 53103 nps
After: 53856 nps
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/3476
No functional change.
This appears to be slightly faster than using a comparison against zero
to compute the high bits, on both old (like Pentium III) and new (like
Zen 2) hardware.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/3254
No functional change.
This patch allows old x86 CPUs, from AMD K8 (which the x86-64 baseline
targets) all the way down to the Pentium MMX, to benefit from NNUE with
comparable performance hit versus hand-written eval as on more modern
processors.
NPS of the bench with NNUE enabled on a Pentium III 1.13 GHz (using the
MMX code):
master: 38951
this patch: 80586
NPS of the bench with NNUE enabled using baseline x86-64 arch, which is
how linux distros are likely to package stockfish, on a modern CPU
(using the SSE2 code):
master: 882584
this patch: 1203945
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2956
No functional change.
