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Subject: Re: To SMP or not to SMP what's the answer?

Author: Jay Urbanski

Date: 17:38:20 04/10/03

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On April 10, 2003 at 13:25:21, Jonas Bylund wrote:

>Personally i have seen a great difference in the long run between SMP capable
>chess engines and single processor engines, in the words of someone who have
>dealt with both, what would you say are the pro's and con's??
>
>Jonas

I won't run anything but SMP machines as my desktop.  One of the main reasons is
that there is a lot of buggy software out there and invariably one of these
programs will go wild and hog the entire CPU.  If you have two, usually it only
pegs one of them and you have another to spare while you find the app and kill
it.  With one, your machine could be so bogged down it takes you forever to find
the app and kill it.

Also, I tend to multi-task heavily and two is better than one when you have many
applications running at once.

As for chess engines, there is a definite speedup when you can multiply the
fastest available processor on the market by 1.8X or so.   Now if only someone
would write an open source MPI chess engine so I could run it on all these Linux
Clusters... sigh.

Your mileage may vary.



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