Author: Albert Silver
Date: 00:47:20 09/08/05
I've been doing some preliminary tests to compare the performance between my 2
GHz Athlon Desktop and my newly acquired Pocket PC, a Dell Axim X50v Intel
XScale running at 624 MHz. Of course the clock speeds are meaningless here, so I
ran Toga and Fruit on some positions, on both the PC and through CEBoard. I
tried to use Crafty Classic 2004, the only other engine in CEBoard that has a
twin brother on the PC, but could not find it at Peter Skinner's site.
I compared the time it took to reach certain node counts on positions, verifying
they took the same number of nodes, and compared the relative speeds. As I could
not give them more than 14Mb hash on the Dell, I limited the PC to the same hash
size, in order to better compare the relative CPU power. The result was a rough
15x-16x speed difference, which would seem to indicate about 150-200 elo points
difference, assuming a rough branching factor of 2.5 - 3, and about 50 to 65 elo
per ply. I'd round up though, since the larger hash of a PC would strongly
increase the engine's performance.
In terms of how strong this is compared to a human, it all depends on how big an
elo you would guess Fruit or Toga to have on a 2GHz machine using say 256Mb
Hash. The results of engines cannot be doubted, so a rough estimate of 2700
doesn't seem unreasonable, which would make them roughly 2500 on the Dell.
Very impressive for a machine that measures 11.9 x 7.3 cm (4.7 x 2.9 inches) and
weighs 200 grams (7 oz).
All I can say is I hope other authors will consider using Zanchetta's tool at
his site (http://www.zanchetta.net/CEBoard/CEBoard.aspx#package) to compile a
Pocket PC version of their engines.
Albert
P.S. I'll just add that if bought in the US, be sure to use some Dell coupons
that can be acquired on ebay, as they can drive the price of the Axim X50v unit
to under $300 (bought from Dell).
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