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Subject: Re: Shay Bushinki's views on improvement by adding processors

Author: John Merlino

Date: 11:02:26 02/15/03

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On February 15, 2003 at 13:12:28, Uri Blass wrote:

>On February 15, 2003 at 12:59:29, Mike Hood wrote:
>
>>On February 15, 2003 at 12:39:18, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>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.
>>
>>Sorry, Robert, I think I expressed my question inaccurately. I'm not interested
>>in the speed increase (which is easy to measure), but in the chess playing
>>strength increase. Is the strength increase achieved by adding a second
>>processor equal to, less than or greater than replacing it with a single
>>processor that is 1.7 times as fast? I know, it's difficult to give a
>>"scientific" answer without playing hundreds of games, but maybe you or someone
>>else can give an "intuitive" answer. Shay obviously didn't think that the quad
>>processor used in New York was much better than his dual processor machine at
>>home.
>
>I guess that you may get 40 elo for being 1.7 times faster.
>
>Uri

That sounds about right. Chessmaster adds 50 points for each 2x of CPU power.

jm



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