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Subject: Re: Which CPU should I buy??

Author: Greg Simpson

Date: 03:04:34 11/04/05

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Tablebase access can easily saturate the disk IO, so having two engines using
them at once could be a problem.  You could buy a small second hard disk and
store a copy of the tablebases there and avoid this problem by directing one
engine to use the tablebases on the main disk and the other the tablebases on
the secondary disk.

Other than tablebases, there should be some slow down from memory bus contention
when two engines are running, mostly from hash table access I guess (hard to
cache).  I don't think think this would be a big issue for the X2 processors,
but like you I would be interested if anyone could provide some real data.

If you don't want to run ponder on you could get a bigger benefit from the dual
core system by running two matches at once.

I personally would favor even an X2 3800 system over the 4000 for chess.



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