Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 07:17:06 09/26/01
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On September 25, 2001 at 20:53:51, Dann Corbit wrote: >On September 25, 2001 at 20:13:53, Albert Silver wrote: >[snip] >>I'll argue with it. I doubt very much Deep Junior outsells plain ol' Junior. I >>also doubt very much that Deep Shredder outsold Shredder. I believe (no numbers >>unfortunately) they have sold less than Hiarcs, Tiger, and Nimzo for example. I >>am only speaking of the 'Deep' versions and not their single-cpu brothers that >>do well. The only exception I can think of _might_ (no numbers unfortunately) be >>Deep Fritz as it not only is an SMP version of Fritz 6, but also an improvement >>of it. > >I rather suspect that soon everyone will have "Deep" versions, including >ChessMaster and the rest. Of course, on most PC's they will run a bit *slower* >than non-SMP versions. I don't know where this rumor comes from. My SMP version is so close to my non-SMP version in speed, I can't tell the difference. The only reason I have a non-SMP version is that it doesn't make sense to run two threads on a single cpu. And beginners would make that mistake too often to think about. In Crafty, the "SMP overhead" on a non-SMP machine is one memory load and one conditional branch. This load/branch tests to see if there is an idle processor. The program currently executes maybe 8,000 instructions per node. That turns it into 8,002. That is no penalty to speak of. Other issues like libraries simply don't count as they aren't used inside the search... > >Reason: >Marketing hype -- since those marketing SMP versions will be crowing about how >great they are, and since "Deep" sounds like "Deep Blue" [which the average user >knows is strong enough to beat Kasparov] lots of people will flock to buy them >despite the fact that they will not improve performance with it. > >I suspect that most people who buy it will have no idea that it requires >multiple CPU's for a performance boost.
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