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Subject: Re: I will hazard a wild guess that a computer can be a GM at G/60

Author: Jeremiah Penery

Date: 22:20:45 02/17/00

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On February 17, 2000 at 23:19:37, Laurence Chen wrote:

>You are still missing the whole point and I still think that your comparison is
>wrong. You are measuring a single processor and assuming that in a quad
>processor machine it will compute the same way in a single processor machine.
>Quad processors allow for Parallel Processing, which is much more efficient than
>a single processing.

This is not correct for searching a tree, like in chess.  Efficiency goes down
with more processors.  This is why DB with ~500 processors was only getting
about 30% total efficiency from them.  This is also why you get _less than_
number_of_processors speedup over the single-processor.

Take, for instance, Crafty running on Bob's machine (4x400MHz) vs. Crafty
running on Lonnie's Kryotech Super-G machine (1GHz) - Bob's machine runs Crafty
slower (according to Bob), even though he has nearly twice the processing power.

>Just because there's an increase of 3.75 times in speed,
>the way how the information is processed makes a huge difference.  So the

How so?  I don't think I'm understanding you...

>increase in plies may not be much, but the search area can be increased and sped
>up consiredably.

The search area is increased, but it also increases if you speed up a single
processor.  A single processor at Z MHz will search faster than a 4-processor
machine at 4x(Z/4) MHz in almost all cases, because of parallel loss.

>Also the available number of resources is much greater in a
>quad processor than in the single processor.

Most of the time, but it doesn't have to be.  You can make a quad-processor
machine with 16MB RAM if you want...  In some cases, the memory-interleaving
between processors (especially in dual-processor machines, it's usually better
in quads) and other resource sharing between the processors can become a
bottleneck.



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