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Subject: Re: Can an Athlon 1.3 GHz outperform a dual Intel 800 MHz ?

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 11:00:09 05/06/01

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On May 06, 2001 at 13:32:42, Roy Brunjes wrote:

>On May 06, 2001 at 12:16:06, Laurence Chen wrote:
>
>>On May 06, 2001 at 11:37:02, Jorge Pichard wrote:
>>
>>>On May 06, 2001 at 10:52:39, Jorge Pichard wrote:
>>>
>>>>Has anybody done any tests using a dual motherboard vs an equivalent Single
>>>>processor system? I would like to know if anybody has significant evidence as to
>>>>whether Deep Fritz performs better using a Dual motherboard vs a Single
>>>>Processors. Another intersting experiment would be to test Chess Tiger 14 using
>>>>an AMD Athlon 1.3 GHz vs Deep Fritz using a dual motherboard 700 or 750 MHz.
>>>>
>>>>Please provide result if anybody has done experiment specially using DF.
>>>
>>>
>>>>PS: My question should have been what dual Intel motherboard performs equal to
>>>an Athlon 1.3 Ghz?  Probably the best way to test it would be to use Deep Fritz,
>>>but I have a wild guess that an Athlon 1.3 Ghz can outperform a dual 800 MHz.
>>>
>>>>Pichard.
>>Why not measure equal CPU's, say, Dual 1 GHz against a single 1 GHz?  If you
>>think that it's an unfair test, than why should you think that a dual 800 MHz is
>>equivalent to a 1.3 GHz system?
>
>For the simple reason that you do not get a linear scaling of performance with
>multi-CPU systems running a single application.  I.e. 800MHz x 2 does NOT give
>1.6 GHz of performance to a chess program.  The best scaling I have seen is
>about 75% in moving from 1 to 2 CPUs.  This would mean that you get 800 MHz of
>performance from the first CPU, but only 800 * .75 or about 600 MHz of
>performance equivalent from the second 800 MHz CPU.  That would put the two CPU
>system (each CPU at 800 MHz) at about 1.4 GHz of performance for this
>hypothetical application.

that's right there is no lineair scaling initially. In fact there
is always overhead.

however branching factor gets slightly better because if in some
lines computer sees a need to split, then it might be that the second
processor delivers a cheap cutoff.

Now depending upon how you manage the tree you can get a good speedup.

Of course if the overhead is more, for example because a program is
faster in nodes a second, then it's tougher to get 2.0

Deep fritz gets about 1.9 at 1 hour a move
I measured at fast levels, rapid about 1.4,
very close to what i get in blitz.

Diep scales sooner to 1.9 and then gets over it and gets to 2.0 soon.

At 2 minutes a move in a game diep gets 2.0 easily, especially under
linux, as that works parallel more efficient as long as i don't compare
the nps i get there with what i get under windows.

At faster levels however this isn't the case. At bullet i can be
happy if diep gets better speedup as 1.2 actually. 1.4 might be
seen at blitz, at rapid 1.6 to 1.7 and that slowly goes up to 2.0
for 2 to 3 minutes a move.

this was a long and hard work however to get.

Fritz curve for speedup is quite similar only it needs more time.

Interesting to see is that after 5 minutes of search the total number
of nodes needed to get to a certain depth is LESS when searching
parallel as when searching single cpu. Of course the big overhead
takes care it doesn't have faster search times then!

I was happy to see this phenomena happening as i have it also with
DIEP!

Best regards,
Vincent

>But it is not even that easy.   Each program will have its own scaling
>characteristics, so it is not as easy to determine the performance of Chess
>Program X in a multi-CPU environment by using a formula alone.  The best method
>is to test each program to see how much it benefits from the second (and third,
>and fourth and ....) CPU.
>
>Roy



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