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Subject: Re: Why is SMP not standard in chessprograms?

Author: Slater Wold

Date: 16:34:25 09/25/01

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On September 25, 2001 at 11:57:44, Albert Silver wrote:

>On September 25, 2001 at 10:33:49, Slater Wold wrote:
>
>>On September 25, 2001 at 10:31:17, Jonas Cohonas wrote:
>>
>>>In these times where more and more "regular" people get dual systems, why is it
>>>then not standard for chessprograms to run on 1-x amount of processors?
>>>
>>>Regards
>>>Jonas
>>
>>It is pretty much the standard now.  There are only 2 commercial "top sellers"
>>that aren't.  Chessmaster & Rebel.
>
>Standard? I can only think of 3 commercial programs that support SMP: Deep
>Fritz, Deep Junior, and Deep Shredder. Unless they represent the majority of
>commercial programs they do not constitute a standard IMO. DF is a special case
>as it is not simply an SMP version of Fritz 6, but an upgrade of it. As to the
>other two, I somehow doubt their SMP versions outsold their single-cpu versions.
>Multi-cpu machines are very far from being the standard, and while they may
>certainly be accessible (pricewise) in some countries nowadays, they are a very
>very small minority. Most people think in terms of more MHz or GHz as opposed to
>more cpus.
>
>                                          Albert

How many commercial programs are out there, right now?  Not a *whole* lot.

My comment was about, what I consider, the top 5 chess sellers.  Which are:

Deep Fritz
Deep Junior
Deep Shredder
Rebel
Chessmaster

Anyone would have a tough time arguing those aren't the top sellers.  And they
are all SMP except 2.

I don't believe SMP is the standard at all.  Most people I see here post with
eval's from Deep Fritz, are doing so on single processor machines.

But duals are getting more and more standard.  Quake, the best selling PC game
ever, now supports SMP.  That right there should tell you something.

Slate

>
>
>
>>
>>It takes a lot of work to get a program to use SMP, and use it correctly.
>>
>>
>>Slate



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