New features in Version 24.14 of prime95.exe -------------------------------------------- 1) A bug that caused the torture test to hang on 256K FFTs on SSE2 machines with 128K of L2 cache was fixed. New features in Version 24.13 of prime95.exe -------------------------------------------- 1) Celeron D (256K L2 cache) and Willamette (also 256K L2 cache) now have different implementations for several FFT sizes. This results in an improvement of several percent for the Celeron D. 2) A bug that caused some machines to generate "Error 2252" when communicating with the server was fixed. 3) SSE2 trial factoring code had a bug when factoring very large exponents. New features in Version 24.12 of prime95.exe -------------------------------------------- 1) For SSE2 machines the larger FFTs have been changed to more effectively use a wide variety of L2 cache sizes. The previous version was optimized for a 256KB L2 cache only. Depending on your CPU and FFT size, you could see an improvement of several percent. 2) As a side "benefit" even larger FFT sizes are now supported. This allows testing of exponents up to 596 million. Not recommended. 3) The factoring breakeven points have been recalculated using my 2 GHz P4. This version of prime95 will do less trial factoring. 4) Since server database crashes cause spurious error 3 messages, prime95 will now ignore error 3 messages from the server for 72 hours. This should workaround the problem whereby a result is reported but no CPU credit is given and the reservation is not cleared. 5) Fixed crash bug trial factoring exponents above 286 million. New features in Version 24.11 of prime95.exe -------------------------------------------- 1) Faster FFTs for AMD64 using prefetchw in both 32-bit and 64-bit mode. You can expect about a 15% speed improvement. 2) Prime95 now detects support for 3DNow! instructions. See undoc.txt for overriding this detection with CpuSupports3DNow=n in local.ini. 3) Factoring entries in worktodo.ini now accept exponents up to 2 billion. 4) Improved checking for memory allocation errors during a torture test. Better guessing of amount of memory to use in a blend test. 5) Added timeouts to PrimeNet communications in hopes of avoiding rare hangs when contacting the PrimeNet server. 6) Fixed rare bug where P-1's GCD could miss a factor. 7) Added trial factoring to the benchmark. 8) Fixed bug in ECM when using zero-padded FFTs. 9) SSE2 macros optimized for an additional 1-3% improvement on P4 and AMD64 CPUs. New features in Version 24.10 of prime95.exe -------------------------------------------- 1) 64-bit version of prime95 available for 64-bit Windows. New features in Version 24.9 of prime95.exe ------------------------------------------- 1) Fixed crash when running on machines with "no-execute" protection. 2) Fixed mis-detection of some P3 and Celeron CPUs. New features in Version 24.6 of prime95.exe ------------------------------------------- 1) Athlon users should see a 20% to 30% speed increase. 2) Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III users should see dramatically WORSE performance. Run version 23 instead. 3) P-1 and ECM now support numbers of the form k*b^n+c. This cannot be done from the menus. Add these entries to worktodo.ini: Pminus1=k,b,n,c,B1,B2 ECM2=k,b,n,c,B1,B2,curves_to_do[,specific_sigma] New features in Version 23.9 of prime95.exe ------------------------------------------- 1) The blend torture test now uses less memory by default to prevent thrashing. The in-place torture test is now the default more cases to reduce complaints dealing with memory allocation issues (no pagefile, thrashing, etc.) 2) A bug in continuing after finding a factor when using AdvancedFactor was fixed. New features in Version 23.8 of prime95.exe ------------------------------------------- 1) A communication bug, Primenet Error 1, was fixed in the case where proxy software inserted the text "NetAnts: MaxConnection=1" in the HTML response from the Primenet server. 2) Fixed memory allocation bug in torture test when using 926MB of memory on the 20K FFT size. 3) The program will now try both full and a relative URL in trying to contact the PrimeNet server. Some rare setups only work with full URLs and some only work with relative URLs. The small downside is there might be an increase in network traffic when the server is down. If this is a concern you can use the UseFullURL option described in undoc.txt. New features in Version 23.7 of prime95.exe ------------------------------------------- 1) A bug was fixed where the torture test used more virtual memory than necessary, sometimes resulting in an "Out of memory" error. New features in Version 23.6 of prime95.exe ------------------------------------------- 1) Several changes have been made to the torture test. a) Machines faster than 1 GHz will use new test data that runs a lot more iterations. This will reduce time spent in initialization code, hopefully increasing stress on the CPU. b) The torture test stops after 100 ILLEGAL SUMOUT errors. c) There are now 3 flavors of torture testing. One that operates on small FFTs only, theoretically maximizing FPU stress. One that operates in place on large FFTs only, maximizing heat and power drain. One that runs a blend of tests using lots of memory, possibly catching errors that might only occur at a specific memory address. New features in Version 23.5 of prime95.exe ------------------------------------------- 1) Four changes have been made after GIMPS' first false positive report in 7 1/2 years of operation. a) The program now returns the number of errors that occurred when the result is prime. A non-zero value will make us more suspect of the reported prime. b) The save files will not be deleted. The user can then email these to me and we can rerun the last 30 minutes of the LL test. It is hard to imagine a second false positive report in this mini LL run. c) The shift counter is now checked every iteration. If this variable AND the FFT data was corrupted, then and endless loop of LL iterations generating zero is possible - resulting in a false prime report. d) Every iteration the FFT data is checked to see if the data has been zeroed. e) The is-this-a-prime check now makes sure the FFT data is not NaN. NaN stands for not a number and means the data is corrupt. The previous version checked for zero and my C compiler returns TRUE for the test NaN == 0.0! 2) I restored the old behavior sending relative URLs. Some users had trouble with this feature introduced in 23.4. So, UseFullURL=0 is now the default. 3) Some prefetching improvements were made for the Athlon, Pentium 3, and Celeron 2 processors. You can expect speed improvements between 3% and 10% for most FFT sizes. Warning: the new code is slower for Durons and Celeron's with small L2 caches for FFT sizes 1024K and above. New features in Version 23.4 of prime95.exe ------------------------------------------- 1) Further performance improvements in the SSE2 FFT code. I've tried to do more work while data is in the L1 data cache. 2) The program should now work with a "redirected proxy server". This was done by sending full URLs in Primenet requests. While I don't anticipate any problems, the old relative URL functionality can be had by setting UseFullURL=0 in primenet.ini. 3) A bug in the assembly language add and subtract routines was fixed. The bug could affect ECM on exponents just below MAXIMUM_EXPONENT_FOR_FFTLEN - FFTLEN/2. New features in Version 23.3 of prime95.exe ------------------------------------------- 1) Further performance improvements in the SSE2 code for FFTs larger than 640K. You should see about a 4% improvement in LL tests on a P4. However, FFTs between 40K and 512K might be a tiny bit slower. 2) Stage 2 of P-1 factoring has been recoded for more speed. WARNING: when continuing from a save file created in stage 2 by a previous prime95 version, this version will restart stage 2 from the beginning. ALSO: the stage 2 P-1 save file format has changed - in dual boot scenarios you must upgrade mprime and prime95 at the same time. New features in Version 23.2 of prime95.exe ------------------------------------------- 1) Further performance improvements in the SSE2 code. You can expect about a 5% improvement in LL tests on a P4. New features in Version 23.1 of prime95.exe ------------------------------------------- 1) Big SSE2 FFTs now take the L2 cache size into account. P4 Celeron (128KB L2 cache) is faster for FFTs between 512K and 2M. P4 Northwood (512KB L2 cache) is faster for FFTs larger than 1M. 2) Benchmark no longer times 256K and 320K FFTs, but does time 2048K FFT. 3) Support for torture testing FFT sizes from 1280K to 4096K added. 4) A 900 MHz P-III is now required to get first time LL tests by default. 5) Slightly faster SSE2 FFTs for lengths of 5*2^N and 7*2^N (e.g. 640K, 896K). New features in Version 22.13 of prime95.exe -------------------------------------------- 1) A P-1 and ECM QA suite was implemented. A bug in ECM for exponents below 172,700 and near the limit of an FFT size and using SSE2 code was fixed. New features in Version 22.12 of prime95.exe -------------------------------...
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