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Subject: Re: movegen speeds(was Re: Status of Brutus?)

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 14:35:01 07/29/03

Go up one level in this thread


On July 29, 2003 at 17:14:52, Keith Evans wrote:

>On July 29, 2003 at 17:04:44, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>On July 29, 2003 at 16:13:19, Keith Evans wrote:
>>
>>>On July 29, 2003 at 16:00:20, Tord Romstad wrote:
>>>
>>>>On July 29, 2003 at 12:49:49, Keith Evans wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>You're perft performance seems pretty decent to me.
>>>>
>>>>Indeed.  I just did a similar test with my own program on a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz.
>>>>In the position after 1. e4 e5 2. d4 d5, my program generates 30 million moves
>>>>per second.  I guess I could speed it up somewhat, but I don't think I would
>>>>come anywhere close to the speeds reported by Vincent and Angrim.
>>>>
>>>>My move genererator assigns all moves a move ordering score, and also
>>>>determines which moves are checks.  It generates legal moves only.
>>>>
>>>>But anyway, I don't understand why people spend so much time and energy on
>>>>micro-optimising their move generators.  Despite my slow movegen speed, my
>>>>program spends only 1 or 2 percent of its time in the move generator.  I
>>>>guess most other programmers have similar numbers.
>>>>
>>>>Tord
>>>
>>>I'm personally interested in the performance of the move generator in a hardware
>>>chess chip where it is a large percentage of the total cycles. If it were only
>>>1-2% of the time then I wouldn't be interested. Of course a hardware move
>>>generator can generate millions of NPS when only running at say 30 MHz, so it's
>>>a totally different animal than a software generator running on a 3 GHz
>>>processor.
>>
>>hardware doesn't work like that. you cannot store the moves.
>>
>
>Huh? (Duh?) Where did I say that it pregenerates and stores the moves? Of course
>it generates them incrementally.

but i hope you realize how hard it is to order moves when all you have is 1
bound that gives how far the incremental generation is.

but if you compare speeds.

Say that each move costs 1 clock. that's 30 million moves a second at 30Mhz
right?

Brutus ran at 2002 WCC at something like 33Mhz. So that's 33 MLN a second.

DIEP i generate way more than 33MLN a second at the 1.6Ghz K7 i had back then.

At 2.127Ghz it is about 72MLN. this with slow RAM storage. It's probably
relatively faster at a P4 generating moves because of the fast L1 cache there
and everything runs within trace cache when doing a loop for a few millions of
times.

So as soon as we touch the sequential part, then hardware chessprograms look in
advance outdated of course.

Most people do not realize that though.

>And of course when it makes a move it does
>store the move so that unmake it later.



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