Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: interview with Michael Adams posted on chessbase

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 05:23:11 07/04/05

Go up one level in this thread


On July 03, 2005 at 07:50:05, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On July 02, 2005 at 09:56:50, Mark Young wrote:
>
>>On July 01, 2005 at 22:27:02, Eugene Nalimov wrote:
>>
>>>On July 01, 2005 at 21:38:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>
>>>>...
>>>>
>>>>My point was that Hydra is most _certainly_ not some new level of computer chess
>>>>as stated by Adams.  I wouldn't argue against it being the best computer chess
>>>>entity at the moment.  But it is absolutely _not_ head and shoulders above
>>>>others.  The advantage I have is that I have a lot of experience with parallel
>>>>and distributed search, and know the losses that a distributed search entails
>>>>compared to a pure SMP approach.  And even if they are currently reaching 200M
>>>>nodes per second, which I somehow doubt given the FPGA numbers they have
>>>>published in the past, that is not _that_ much faster than other readily
>>>>available hardware.  I've seen numbers well beyond 20M for Crafty on a quad
>>>>dual-core opteron, for example.  I've seen numbers more than double that on
>>>>other machines I can't really mention at the moment.  So they are not _that_ far
>>>>beyond today's programs.  Clearly Adam's comments are based on some other
>>>>reality or understanding that is not based on factual analysis.
>>>
>>>Today you can buy Itanium2 64-CPU system at
>>>http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/integrity/superdome_high_end/
>>>
>>>Last time I measured Crafty run at ~1.5Mnps on one Itanium2 CPU. So with some
>>>additional work (avoid cache conflicts, maybe introduce smaller local hash to be
>>>probed at the last ply or two) Crafty can hit ~100Mnps on such beast.
>>>
>>>For less than $40k you can buy reasonable configured 8 sockets / 16 cores
>>>Opteron system. For example take a look at
>>>http://www.pcsforeveryone.com/product_info.php?cPath=1967&products_id=14101&customize=true
>>>
>>>Crafty should run at ~30-35Mnps on such system.
>>>
>>>Both those systems are NUMA, not clusters, so search should be more efficient.
>>>
>>>Thanks,
>>>Eugene
>>
>>I have a question. What is better, and by how much.
>>
>>A AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core ... Or a Dual Opteron system? My quess would be the
>>dual opteron would be a bit faster, but the dual-core would be cheaper.
>>
>>What is the best bang for the buck?
>
>As you can see for Diep it hardly matters in speed when using the same clocked
>processor. However dual core is there to 2.2Ghz and dual single core is there
>till 2.6Ghz.
>
>So dual 2.6ghz is faster than dual core 2.2Ghz opteron.
>
>Dual core A64 i didn't checkout highest clocked ones yet. If that's 2.6ghz too,
>then it's equally fast.
>
>Obviously buying a system with 1 processor is always cheaper than a system with
>2 processors.

Yes obviously, however you forget the crucial point.

A dual dual core system has 4 cores in total. A single cpu system has 2 cores in
total (at this moment in history).

4 cores x 2.2Ghz is faster than 2 cores x 2.6Ghz

A quad dual core system has 8 cores in total. If you can afford it (as the
highest clocked dual core quad capable cpu's are expensive, like 2300+ dollar a
piece versus 823 dollar for the 1.8Ghz versions) then this is far faster of
course than a dual dual core.

A 8 processor dual core system has 16 cores in total and is again faster but
more expensive.

Vincent



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.