A question about the best hardware for chess today

[Uri Blass]

A correspondence player that I know think of buying a new hardware and wonder what is the best hardware that he can buy.

If there is some table of speed of rybka in nodes per seconds in some chess positions for different prices of hardware then it may be productive.

Uri

[Sean Evans]

At the 2009 WCCC Rybka used Intel Xeon W5580 @ 3.2GHz x 8. Obviously, the owner of the program would take the best hardware for his program. If he wants to save money he can buy the Intel Core i7.

http://www.grappa.univ-lille3.fr/icga/t ... php?id=192

http://www.shopbot.ca/pp-intel-xeon-w55 ... 20163.html

http://www.shopbot.ca/default.asp?kw=In ... ion=search

[Sean Evans]

Rybka benchmarks:

http://www.sedatchess.com/rybkabenchmarks.html

[bob]

A correspondence player that I know think of buying a new hardware and wonder what is the best hardware that he can buy.

If there is some table of speed of rybka in nodes per seconds in some chess positions for different prices of hardware then it may be productive.

Uri

Fastest I7 (Intel) processor he can find, with the most cores he can afford.

[jdart]

It is questionable whether the absolute fastest machine is really necessary. You can pay an awful lot for the last 10-20% increment in performance.

That said, he might consider a 2xquad Xeon server class machine like this:

http://polywell.com/us/servers/PolyServer5520A18.asp

Dell has similar stuff but it seems to run $5K and up.

I understand some correspondence players like to run multiple engines so another thing to consider is getting a couple quad machines instead (which are a lot cheaper). But if you want max performance on 1 box an 8-core is the way to go I think. Of course in a few years that will seem puny.

--Jon

[Sean Evans]

Fastest I7 (Intel) processor he can find, with the most cores he can afford.

Bob, would you prefer Crafty to run on an Intel i7 OR Intel Xeon W5580 @ 3.2GHz

[zullil]

Fastest I7 (Intel) processor he can find, with the most cores he can afford.

My employer just provided me with a Mac Pro that has two E5520 chips (2.26GHz, quad core, 45nm). Thus I have eight cores available.

I compiled Crafty-23.0 from source using the latest icc for Mac OSX, employing pgo.

Here's what I got:

Code: Select all

LZsMacPro: ~/Documents/Chess/Crafty/Crafty-23.0] ./crafty-23.0 
max threads set to 8.
EGTB access enabled
using tbpath=/Users/louis/Documents/Chess/Crafty/TB
5 piece tablebase files found
14043kb of RAM used for TB indices and decompression tables
EGTB cache memory =  256M bytes.
hash table memory = 3072M bytes.
pawn hash table memory =  512M bytes.
choose from book moves randomly (using weights.)
choose from 5 best moves.
pondering enabled.
Audio output enabled
 game/10 minutes primary time control


Crafty v23.0 (8 cpus)

White(1): bench
Running benchmark. . .
......
Total nodes: 130877509
Raw nodes per second: 17403924
Total elapsed time: 7.52
White(1): 
White(1): quit

How does this compare to your 8-core box? Thanks.

[bob]

Fastest I7 (Intel) processor he can find, with the most cores he can afford.

Bob, would you prefer Crafty to run on an Intel i7 OR Intel Xeon W5580 @ 3.2GHz

I'd take the quad-core i7, currently at about the same speed clock-wise. When the xeon-MP version comes out later this year, it won't be long until we see 4 socket 32 core machines that will be beyond fast.

[bob]

I get this on my two-year-old 8-core cluster nodes:

Code: Select all

max threads set to 8.
White(1): bench
Running benchmark. . .
......
Total nodes: 117288772
Raw nodes per second: 15037022
Total elapsed time: 7.80

[tano-urayoan]

Fastest I7 (Intel) processor he can find, with the most cores he can afford.

Bob, would you prefer Crafty to run on an Intel i7 OR Intel Xeon W5580 @ 3.2GHz

I'd take the quad-core i7, currently at about the same speed clock-wise. When the xeon-MP version comes out later this year, it won't be long until we see 4 socket 32 core machines that will be beyond fast.

Hello Dr. Hyatt.
Which will be your selection, quad i7 or a dual W5580 system?