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Subject: Re: Is Zappa now running at the same hardware speed as hydra?

Author: Sune Larsson

Date: 22:21:01 12/27/05

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On December 28, 2005 at 00:55:19, Dann Corbit wrote:

>On December 28, 2005 at 00:36:53, Juan Pablo Naar C. wrote:
>
>>Zappa is running at 128 cpu 1.6ghz itanium2
>>Hydra is running at 64 cpu 3.2ghz xeon
>>
>>calculating by ghz, they are running at the same speed! or am i just plain
>>wrong??
>
>You are just plain wrong.
>
>The Xeon CPUs on Hydra are almost irrelevant.  The real horsepower is in the
>custom chess circuits.  The Xeons are just message passers, for the most part.
>The bulk of the computation is happening in custom integrated circuits that do
>things like "Nxe4+" instead of "mov EAX, 0xDEADBEEF".
>
>I seem to recall that Hydra does about 200M NPS.
>
>I guess that Zappa might get up to 80M NPS on that configuration.  So, very
>likely the NPS of Zappa might come to within a significant portion of Hydra (but
>not due to the Xeon chips, really).
>
>But the NPS is not important anyway.
>
>I can look at a trillion wrong nodes in a second and not make decisions that are
>any better than looking at a few better nodes.
>
>With chess engines, like many other things, "The proof of the pudding is in the
>eating."


 Yes, if you don't get the position - a massive speedup just mean that you
 still don't get it - but a lot faster...

 /S



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