Back in the late 1980s and using a 16 MHz Motorola 68020, I calculated perft(7) in about 36 hours of CPU time with my old bitboard program Spector. Admittedly, Spector had no transposition table assistance in perft() mode. With my new machine, the calculation takes just under one second.Joost Buijs wrote:The i7-5690X is one of the highest performing CPU's till date.sje wrote:Initial benchmark results
For BusyFEN, Symbolic on the new 3.0 GHz Core i7-5680X octo machine returns a 37.8709 MHz throughput node frequency; this is nearly twice that of the 20.2188 MHz from a year 2011 3.4 GHz Core i7-2600 quad.
perft(7) 0.922 seconds
perft(8) 11.883 seconds
perft(9) 121.699 seconds
perft(10) 1,414.779 seconds
In my experience ASUS mainboards are very stable and reliable, sometimes they can be a little picky about the brand of memory you use.
But in all these years I never had an ASUS mainboard failing on me once.
The only thing that fails sometimes is the power supply unit, that is the weakest part.
Actually it is a technical miracle that it works. Modern CPU's are drawing in access of 100 Ampere through these fragile sockets and the printed circuit wiring.
In the early 2000s, I had Spector calculate perft(10) on a 1.0 GHz 32 bit PowerPC G4; this took about two weeks. The new machine uses only 24 minutes.
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Of all the perft(7) calculations done so far in the perft(14) project, the one with the highest subtotal is:
[d]r1b1kbnr/pppp1pp1/2n1p3/6q1/4Q3/4P3/PPPP1PPP/RNB1KBNR b KQkq - 2 4[/d]
with a path count of 282,695,441,146. The i7-5680X did the calculation in 34 seconds. The colorful log file for this is at: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/316 ... /p7max.log
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While the i7-5680X may be the highest performing consumer CPU, at US$1,050 it may also be the highest priced consumer CPU, at least in recent memory. Despite the price, there is still a great demand, apparently coming from the overclocker and gamer communities who also drive the market for ridiculously powerful video cards.
Upon close examination, the i7-5680x is really a server CPU, like its Xeon near-siblings. That explains its support for eight SATA 3 interfaces, 2133 MHz DDR4 RAM, and 40 PCI 3 lanes -- things not usually needed in consumer computers.
http://ark.intel.com/products/82930/Int ... o-3_50-GHz
Using water cooling, the i7-5680X can be overclocked by about 40%, at least with some mainboards like Asus X99 Deluxe and the Asus X99 Rampage. The case I have doesn't have vents for a dual radiator water cooler and I have doubts that a single radiator model would suffice. I could buy a larger case with the extra vents, but the one I have is already rather large to allow for the 800 W power supply. I use an 800 W supply because long experience has shown me that specifying a supply with at least twice the needed maximum wattage means many years of reliable operation, even when running 24/7. I'm not sure how much of an overclock can be had with air cooling and I'm not in a big rush to find out.
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I suspect that the main reason that a chip with 2,011 pins can eat 100 Amps is that a couple of hundred of those pins are connected to the power rails to distribute the load.