Author: Richard A. Fowell (fowell@netcom.com)
Date: 01:10:04 03/04/99
Go up one level in this thread
On March 04, 1999 at 03:28:08, Baldomero Garcia, Jr. wrote:
<snip>
>I also looked at the Macintosh side of the house. I'm not a big fan of
>Macintosh, even though I own one. Apparently, Apple brags that the new G3 400
>Mhz is faster than the PII 450 Mhz, at least in the integer
>test conducted by Byte magazine.
For HIARCS 7.0, the G3/400 is not only faster than a Pentium 450, it is
faster than a Pentium II/550 would be.
I base this on my 2.5 hour HIARCS benchmark test (average of 33 of the LCTII
positions for 4.5 minutes thinking each - see full table at end. If any
of you HIARCS owners pick up a Pentium III/500 (or 550), please let me know,
and I'll send you the benchmark. I'd love to get some stats on the PIII.
If you really want some serious horsepower - there are G3/466 CPUs available
for upgrades now. Think "Pentium II/640 MHz". And, when plugged into
the newest G3's, these run at 550 MHz (presumably no guarantee they will
work on all of them). Think "Pentium II/766 MHz". And you can buy one now.
See http://www.macintouch.com/g3zif466.html
>The problem is, there are not a lot of computer chess programs available
>for the Mac.
?! There are more chess programs available for the Mac than even I am
willing to spend the money to buy. See
http://directory.mozilla.org/Games/Board_Games/Chess/Software/Macintosh/
>I think HIARCS is the only commercial one,
HIARCS 7.0 is the only top-tier SSDF program available for the Mac.
Of course, it's at the top of the list, and runs faster on the Mac than
on the Pentiums, so that's not too bad. But, I'll grant you, the depth
isn't there. For the chess utility programs (things other than chess engines)
if there's anything you want that isn't on the Mac,
SoftWindows on the Mac seems to work just fine - I've used Chess Mentor,
Gromit, Chessmaster 5000, and others under SoftWindows. But for chess
engine analysis, SoftWindows is a drastic drop in horsepower.
Other commercial chess programs available for the Mac are:
- Chessmaster 4000 (probably 180 points weaker than HIARCS)
- Sigma Chess 4.0 (probably even weaker, and the freeware version above
makes purchase marginal, but it is fantastic as freeware).
- Virtual Chess (but France is the only place I've found where you can
actually purchase it).
- Checkmate ( not very strong, but allows modem play, vs. BattleChess, too).
It sounds like, by "chess programs" you intend "chess playing programs",
as opposed to:
Chess Databases
ExaChess
SmartChess
Essentia Mac
Bookup Mac
ChessBase Mac (if there are any copies left - they've stopped production)
Chess Tutorials
Chess Mentor Mac
Maurice Ashley Teaches Chess (Mac)
Chess Mates
Dr Schiller Teaches Chess
Chess Tournament pairing programs
(forget the name, but it is on the list)
> while Mac Chess 5.0 and Crafty (Mac version) are available as freeware.
Also, Sigma Chess Lite 4.02 is very nice.
There are lots of others (GNUChess, RChess, Chess++, TSCP, and a couple
of shareware ones, but they don't come close to the Crafty/MacChess/Sigma
programs).
>I'm not sure how strong Chessmaster 4000 for the Mac is.
About 180 points less than HIARCS 7.0. But boy, can it see checkmates!
Too bad about the interface. Yechhh.
>
>In any case, it'd be interesting to see the rating lists from the SSDF include
>faster processors than the aging P200. Of course, money is the big issue in
>upgrading computers, and I'm not sure when we should expect
>the upgrades to happen.
The SSDF folks did say they were shopping. The K7 sounds like it might
be worth waiting for. For HIARCS, anyway, the AMD machines seem to do
a bit better than the Intel chips.
HIARCS 7 - with 64Mb Hash (Mac) or 63Mb Hash (PC)
Machine CPU MHz CPU Nodes/second nps/MHz Configuration
===================================================================
Mac Yosemite 400 MHz 750 53,413 nps 133.5 Sys 8.5.1, 128Mb RAM, G3
Mac Yosemite 350 MHz 750 47,615 nps 136.0 Sys 8.5.1, 128Mb RAM, G3
Mac PowerBook 300 MHz 750 40,062 nps 133.5 Sys 8.5, 192Mb RAM, G3
Mac ??? 310 MHz 750 38,929 nps 125.6 Sys 8.1, accel. card?
Pent II /400 400 MHz PII 38,347 nps 95.9 Win 98 "safe mode" (DOS)
AMD K6/350 350 MHz K6 35,052 nps 100.1 Win 95, -x 63 Mb hash
Mac iMac 233 MHz 750 30,942 nps 132.8 Sys 8.5.1, 96Mb RAM
Mac 7300/180 180 MHz 604e 20,567 nps 114.3 Sys 7.5.5, 80Mb RAM
Pentium MMX 200 MHz P5? 18,910 nps 94.5 SSDF test machine, 64Mb RAM
Mac 6100/ 66 66 MHz 601 4,862 nps 73.7 Sys 7.5 , 72Mb RAM
Richard A. Fowell (fowell@netcom.com)
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