Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in releasing v19. It is now available for
mersenne mailing list members to beta test. If all goes well,
it will be officially released to all GIMPSers in a few weeks.
You can get the new version at ftp://entropia.com/gimps/p95b.zip
To upgrade prime95, stop and exit the current version. Optionally
make a backup of the directory containing prime95. Unzip the
new version on top of the old version. Start the new prime95.
Next time you contact the server, it will broadcast a welcome message
to you. Let me know if there are any problems with this new feature.
The message will be deleted prior to the final release of v19. This
feature gives us an effective way to inform you of new versions and
important bugs or news.
Save files are upward compatible from previous versions, but not
backward compatible. Thus, do not try this beta if you are in a dual-boot
environment. The Linux and NT service versions will be available soon.
I'd like to thank the excellent work of the QA team. They located
many bugs, bringing you a higher quality beta. The QA team included
Ken Kriesel, Brian Beesley, Tom Cage, Jean-Yves Canart, Bryan Fullerton,
Marc Getty, Steinar H. Gunderson, Eric Hahn, Alex Healy, Paul Landon,
Greg McIntyre, Lawrence Murray, Paul Victor Novarese, Ethan M. O'Connor,
Rick Pali, Shane Sanford, Brian Schroeder, Gordon Spence, Joth Tupper,
Guillermo Ballester Valor, David Willmore, and Lucas Wiman.
And, of course, thanks to Scott Kurowski for his v19 enhancements to
the Primenet server.
Here is the relevant excerpt from whatsnew.txt:
1) Faster - in some cases as much as 10% faster!. The FFTs were recoded
for improved memory and TLB efficiency. Furthermore, optimizations
specific to the Pentium Pro and later processors were added.
2) New FFT lengths. The program can now test exponents as large as
79.3 million. Also, smaller FFT lengths are supported for use in
ECM and P-1 factoring.
3) More conservative FFT breakpoints. This could actually result in
some exponents being slower to test in this version. However, the
chance of a fatal rounding error has been reduced.
4) P-1 factoring has been added. Although it is not very practical for
large exponents because of a slow GCD routine, it can be used to
find new factors of exponents below a few million or so.
5) ECM can now run on large exponents. Once again, the slow GCD routine
and high memory requirements might make this impractical for large
exponents.
6) ECM and P-1 factoring now support save files. Very handy on lengthy runs.
7) ECM and P-1 factoring lets you specify the amount of memory to use.
In some cases, more memory can improve execution speed slightly.
8) A bug in guessing the CPU speed on initial install has been fixed.
9) The preferences dialog now has an option to pause prime95 when a laptop
is running on its battery.
10) Error checking has been improved slightly.
11) Factoring is now "layered". That is, prime95 now factors to 2^52, then
2^53, 2^54, and so forth up to the appropriate limit. The factoring
output lines have been changed to show percent complete in the current
"layer".
12) A bug in running two or more self or torture tests in the same directory
has been fixed.
13) Trial factoring above 2^64 is now supported.
14) More trial factoring is now done to take into account the cost of
double-checking.
15) Title now contains percent complete when LL testing. By default, the
percent complete value is now displayed to 2 decimal places. You can
change this by setting PercentPrecision in prime.ini to a value
between 0 and 6.
16) Affinity and service name settings moved from prime.ini to local.ini file.
Prime95 will automatically move these settings for you.
17) An option to get only 10,000,000 digit numbers to run primality tests
on has been added to the Test/Primenet dialog box. See
http://www.mersenne.org/prize.htm for rules on claiming the EFF award
for finding a 10,000,000 digit prime.
18) The Advanced/Clear primes menu choice has been deleted.
19) The prime95 icon turns yellow when the program is idle. After an
error such as ILLEGAL SUMOUT, the icon will blink for 10 seconds.
20) The User Information dialog box allows you to request newsletters and
form a team user ID where the team members cannot alter the team name.
21) A bug in the reporting of error counts in the results.txt file has
been fixed.
22) The server can now broadcast important messages to the prime95 client.
Prime95 will blink the icon until prime95 is activated and then it will
display the message.
Finally, here is the timings table from my PII-400:
V18 timing V19 timing old P-90 timings
-- --
80K 0.038 0.036
96K 0.047 0.0445 0.272
112K0.058 0.0548 0.332
128K0.0645
