Stockfish Mac app

[karger]

Could you please make a version of this app for Mac OSX 10.4.11 Tiger PPC (Non-Intel chip based) and earlier ? There are still a lot of us Non-Intel based mac Ibook G4 & G5 users left out there. Thank you , John Karger

[zullil]

Could you please make a version of this app for Mac OSX 10.4.11 Tiger PPC (Non-Intel chip based) and earlier ? There are still a lot of us Non-Intel based mac Ibook G4 & G5 users left out there. Thank you , John Karger

I still have a Power Mac G3 with 10.4.11. It's sitting in my basement. It was a good computer. Probably still works, but I doubt I'd be able to build Daylen's app. My guess is the XCode software and libraries are just too old.

[JuLieN]

It's finally here! A beautiful, powerful chess app for the Mac. http://stockfishchess.org/mac/

It looks gorgeous; good luck developing it further. But I'm switching to a linux workstation. Really disappointed with the CPU options in the new Mac Pro. $4000 for 6 cores? I'll be getting 16 physical cores for $5000.

Louis, I think you should take more time before switching, and take a look at the reviews. I've watched today a two-hours long review of the Mac Pro (in french), and they said two things that surprised me (and surprised them as well) :
1 - the Mac Pro is upgradable : you can replace nearly all its parts : memory, SSD, CPU (some people even replaced the CPU, as it's not soldered on the board), and the GPUs are on daughter boards which Apple said would be regularly upgraded by them and opened to third party constructors.
2 - If you compare its price with the equivalents from HP and Lenovo (with the same configurations and components) you get a Mac that is noticeably cheaper than the equivalent PC (something very surprising from Apple). They quoted several websites, including AnandTech:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac- ... -late-2013

Also, Mavericks makes a perfect use of the GPUs with OpenCL (ok, not useful for chess). They were extremely impressed by the powerhouse this new MacPro is. The professional movies editors who tested it said they were rendering 4K movies in real time while applying numerous effects. Again, not chess, but it shows how powerful this thing is. You could buy the cheapest one and upgrade its CPU, for instance.

Now you do what you want, and you switch to a PC box if you want to, but don't do it out of poor informations.

[bob]

It's finally here! A beautiful, powerful chess app for the Mac. http://stockfishchess.org/mac/

It looks gorgeous; good luck developing it further. But I'm switching to a linux workstation. Really disappointed with the CPU options in the new Mac Pro. $4000 for 6 cores? I'll be getting 16 physical cores for $5000.

Louis, I think you should take more time before switching, and take a look at the reviews. I've watched today a two-hours long review of the Mac Pro (in french), and they said two things that surprised me (and surprised them as well) :
1 - the Mac Pro is upgradable : you can replace nearly all its parts : memory, SSD, CPU (some people even replaced the CPU, as it's not soldered on the board), and the GPUs are on daughter boards which Apple said would be regularly upgraded by them and opened to third party constructors.
2 - If you compare its price with the equivalents from HP and Lenovo (with the same configurations and components) you get a Mac that is noticeably cheaper than the equivalent PC (something very surprising from Apple). They quoted several websites, including AnandTech:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac- ... -late-2013

Also, Mavericks makes a perfect use of the GPUs with OpenCL (ok, not useful for chess). They were extremely impressed by the powerhouse this new MacPro is. The professional movies editors who tested it said they were rendering 4K movies in real time while applying numerous effects. Again, not chess, but it shows how powerful this thing is. You could buy the cheapest one and upgrade its CPU, for instance.

Now you do what you want, and you switch to a PC box if you want to, but don't do it out of poor informations.

For the record, Mavericks is not so hot with hyper threading turned on, and it is not so easy to turn it off since there is no BIOS settings for the mac. My macbook air is a 2.0ghz i7, two cores, hyper threading. I can run two compute-bound threads and the process scheduler can't run one on each physical core as Linux does naturally. You will get two on one core, two on the other core, one on each core, it really seems to have absolutely no idea about the difference between physical cores and logical cores.

I am currently upgrading my Dell linux laptop to the latest Fedora. If they have not made Gnome unusable, I'm going to do my mac next. This process scheduler sucks. The load average NEVER goes to 0.01 or whatever that I see on my linux boxes, it hovers between 0.5 and 1.5 with NOTHING of mine running. No spotlight. Somebody is too interested in adding unimportant bells and whistles and forgetting about basic functionality first. I do serious benchmarking on my linux boxes. Not on this macbook.

[daylen]

Thank you Daylen for the nice looking app.

I was looking for a way to set up a position (clear board and enter pieces), in order to then let infinite analysis do its thing. Couldn't find it, only pasting a string is possible, right? Or it could be my early morning clumsiness

Thanks for clarification in advance.

Cheers,
Kaj

Unfortunately, currently you can only paste in a FEN string to set up a position. Actual set up position in on the to-do list.

[daylen]

I thought you would be updating it frequently with the latest SF dev releases. If you are not, then why did you throw in a dev version in the first place?

I'll of course always put in the latest engine binary whenever I submit to the Mac App Store. I think automatically downloading and executing new binaries might be against the App Store rules.

[daylen]

It's finally here! A beautiful, powerful chess app for the Mac. http://stockfishchess.org/mac/

If you have a Mac running OS X 10.9 or later, I think you should check it out, and if you would like to, I welcome pull requests!

Can you build this to run on earlier versions of OS X? In any case, you ought to be clear on your website that the current app is Mavericks only.

Oops. I'm don't think I'm using any OS X 10.9-only features, so it probably should work on 10.7-10.8 too if compiled for those OSes. In any case, Mavericks is a free upgrade for 10.6-10.8 users.

[daylen]

Could you please make a version of this app for Mac OSX 10.4.11 Tiger PPC (Non-Intel chip based) and earlier ? There are still a lot of us Non-Intel based mac Ibook G4 & G5 users left out there. Thank you , John Karger

I still have a Power Mac G3 with 10.4.11. It's sitting in my basement. It was a good computer. Probably still works, but I doubt I'd be able to build Daylen's app. My guess is the XCode software and libraries are just too old.

Yeah, I don't think Xcode will let you build PowerPC apps anymore.

[daylen]

It's finally here! A beautiful, powerful chess app for the Mac. http://stockfishchess.org/mac/

It looks gorgeous; good luck developing it further. But I'm switching to a linux workstation. Really disappointed with the CPU options in the new Mac Pro. $4000 for 6 cores? I'll be getting 16 physical cores for $5000.

Louis, I think you should take more time before switching, and take a look at the reviews. I've watched today a two-hours long review of the Mac Pro (in french), and they said two things that surprised me (and surprised them as well) :
1 - the Mac Pro is upgradable : you can replace nearly all its parts : memory, SSD, CPU (some people even replaced the CPU, as it's not soldered on the board), and the GPUs are on daughter boards which Apple said would be regularly upgraded by them and opened to third party constructors.
2 - If you compare its price with the equivalents from HP and Lenovo (with the same configurations and components) you get a Mac that is noticeably cheaper than the equivalent PC (something very surprising from Apple). They quoted several websites, including AnandTech:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac- ... -late-2013

Also, Mavericks makes a perfect use of the GPUs with OpenCL (ok, not useful for chess). They were extremely impressed by the powerhouse this new MacPro is. The professional movies editors who tested it said they were rendering 4K movies in real time while applying numerous effects. Again, not chess, but it shows how powerful this thing is. You could buy the cheapest one and upgrade its CPU, for instance.

Now you do what you want, and you switch to a PC box if you want to, but don't do it out of poor informations.

For the record, Mavericks is not so hot with hyper threading turned on, and it is not so easy to turn it off since there is no BIOS settings for the mac. My macbook air is a 2.0ghz i7, two cores, hyper threading. I can run two compute-bound threads and the process scheduler can't run one on each physical core as Linux does naturally. You will get two on one core, two on the other core, one on each core, it really seems to have absolutely no idea about the difference between physical cores and logical cores.

I am currently upgrading my Dell linux laptop to the latest Fedora. If they have not made Gnome unusable, I'm going to do my mac next. This process scheduler sucks. The load average NEVER goes to 0.01 or whatever that I see on my linux boxes, it hovers between 0.5 and 1.5 with NOTHING of mine running. No spotlight. Somebody is too interested in adding unimportant bells and whistles and forgetting about basic functionality first. I do serious benchmarking on my linux boxes. Not on this macbook.

When writing the code to detect the number of cores (it's a one-liner: [[NSProcessInfo processInfo] activeProcessorCount]) I wondered whether I should use the number of physical or virtual cores. In my very informal testing, I found that hyper threading results in more total nodes per second, so I decided to go with the number of virtual cores.

Test methodology:

Code: Select all

./stockfish
setoption name Hash value 8192
setoption name Threads value [x]
go movetime 15000

I took 3 trials for each value x, and averaged them.

My test results:

Code: Select all

OS X 10.9
Intel Core i7 4960HQ (2.6 GHz, 4 physical, 8 virtual)
System RAM: 16 GB
1 core: 15876856 nodes
2 cores: 37066160 nodes
4 cores: 67616235 nodes
6 cores: 74088573 nodes
8 cores: 91224272 nodes

[zullil]

It's finally here! A beautiful, powerful chess app for the Mac. http://stockfishchess.org/mac/

If you have a Mac running OS X 10.9 or later, I think you should check it out, and if you would like to, I welcome pull requests!

Can you build this to run on earlier versions of OS X? In any case, you ought to be clear on your website that the current app is Mavericks only.

Oops. I'm don't think I'm using any OS X 10.9-only features, so it probably should work on 10.7-10.8 too if compiled for those OSes. In any case, Mavericks is a free upgrade for 10.6-10.8 users.

But some folks have Macs that can't run 10.8 or 10.9. I'm using such a machine right now. A 2007 white macbook stuck on 10.7.