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Subject: Re: Fritz, the RAM glutton

Author: Jeremiah Penery

Date: 00:00:32 05/04/99

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On May 03, 1999 at 23:53:42, James T. Walker wrote:

>On May 03, 1999 at 22:58:02, Charles L. Williams wrote:
>
>>On May 03, 1999 at 22:51:29, Brett Clark wrote:
>>
>>>I'm getting ready to buy a new system (Pentium III 500 Mhz).  I was trying to
>>>decide on how much RAM to buy, so I consulted my Fritz user's manual for the
>>>following formula on how much RAM is needed for hash tables:
>>>
>>>HT[KB] = 2.0*PFreq[MHz]*r[s]
>>>
>>>HT is the hash table size in kilobytes, PFreq is the clock speed of the
>>>processor in MHz, and t the time available per move in seconds.
>>>
>>>So, for a tournament game on this system, (average of 3 minutes per move), Fritz
>>>5.32 requires about 180MB of RAM for optimum performance!  I guess that I just
>>>answered my own question; I'd better get 256MB of RAM.
>>>
>>>How much RAM do the other top programs require?  I would guess that a program
>>>like Hiarchs, which is slower but better positionally than Fritz, would require
>>>less RAM to be effective.  Am I right?

I think Fritz has a relatively ineffective hashing strategy, so that any amount
of HT less than 'optimum' results in noticeably lower performance.  For
comparison, Crafty seems to be almost equal in speed at finding things/reaching
certain ply depths with any reasonable amount of Hash Tables, even when running
VERY long analyses.

Either way, extra RAM can never hurt, and it's always a good idea to get as much
as possible. :)

Jeremiah



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