Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 09:39:18 02/15/03
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On February 15, 2003 at 11:43:40, Mike Hood wrote: >A short quote from Shay Bushink's interview with Mig: > >I'm not sure our dual Athlon at home would have done much worse. We were >somewhat tempted to use the dual because of some initial difficulties we had >with the new hardware, but it was a little better on the quad. The >eight-processor machine wouldn't have made much of a difference, although there >were a few indications that it would have been a bit better in a few situations. > >http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=799 > >Are there any users of this forum who run the deep versions of chess programs >(Fritz, Junior, Shredder, Crafty) on multi-processor PCs who can give opinions >on the performance boost they have observed? I have posted such numbers here many times. Crafty, on a quad at XXX mhz, will run anywhere from 2.5X faster to 4.0X faster than a single cpu at XXX mhz. The average will be around 3.0 or so. The usual "estimate" I give is this: speedup = 1 + (NCPUS -1) * 0.7 And that fits pretty well for an overall "average" speedup. However, that "formula" has only been tested to eight processors, and _most_ of the testing has been on 2 and 4 processors. It is not known (nor even expected) that this scaling will hold for larger numbers of processors. But for duals and quads, the performance is worthwhile. The 8-way boxes vary significantly in performance, depending on how they do memory. For the X86 8-way boxes, they simply are not very good. Other 8-way boxes (alphas, SGI and the like) seem to do just fine but they max out at 16-way (or maybe 32-way) before switching to a NUMA type approach.
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