FPGA chess

[Milos]

The problem with doing evaluation only is that you have to send information about the current position to the device, the standard PC buses like PCI-Express are way too slow and have too much latency for this.

Not necessarily, check for IBM POWER8+CAPI solution. PCIe Gen 3 is integrated in the processor in so called coherence bus, so accelerator has the same address space as the main processor, i.e. no drivers and OS overhead and they participate in "locks" as normal threads yielding very low latency.
However, this is a high-end solution so certainly not for hobbyists and chess enthusiasts (well maybe for some quite rich chess enthusiasts ).

[BeyondCritics]

That seems to fit the purpose perfectly, thank you.

[Joost Buijs]

The problem with doing evaluation only is that you have to send information about the current position to the device, the standard PC buses like PCI-Express are way too slow and have too much latency for this.

Not necessarily, check for IBM POWER8+CAPI solution. PCIe Gen 3 is integrated in the processor in so called coherence bus, so accelerator has the same address space as the main processor, i.e. no drivers and OS overhead and they participate in "locks" as normal threads yielding very low latency.
However, this is a high-end solution so certainly not for hobbyists and chess enthusiasts (well maybe for some quite rich chess enthusiasts ).

When you want to do this professionally there are some solutions but this is way out of reach for hobbyists.
I was always very enthusiastic about computer chess, and in the 38 years that I have been busy with it I spent about 70k on hardware mainly for this purpose.
Now that I'm retired I have to be careful where to spend my money on. So I have to step back a little.
Recently I bought a new mainboard with a 5960x and I suppose I have to live with this for the next 5 years.

[Rein Halbersma]

When you want to do this professionally there are some solutions but this is way out of reach for hobbyists.
I was always very enthusiastic about computer chess, and in the 38 years that I have been busy with it I spent about 70k on hardware mainly for this purpose.
Now that I'm retired I have to be careful where to spend my money on. So I have to step back a little.
Recently I bought a new mainboard with a 5960x and I suppose I have to live with this for the next 5 years.

If you are spending that kind of money, why not go for the Xeon version (E5-1660-v3), which will unlock the 64G memory limitation that its i7 cousin has?

[Joost Buijs]

When you want to do this professionally there are some solutions but this is way out of reach for hobbyists.
I was always very enthusiastic about computer chess, and in the 38 years that I have been busy with it I spent about 70k on hardware mainly for this purpose.
Now that I'm retired I have to be careful where to spend my money on. So I have to step back a little.
Recently I bought a new mainboard with a 5960x and I suppose I have to live with this for the next 5 years.

If you are spending that kind of money, why not go for the Xeon version (E5-1660-v3), which will unlock the 64G memory limitation that its i7 cousin has?

In practice I will never use more than 32G memory.
The 768G address space of the E5-1660-v3 looks nice but I haven't seen a mainboard yet that allows you to put this amount of memory on.
Anyway I'm very happy with the 5960x, it's performance is mind boggling.
If you want to spend less money a 5930k would be a nice alternative, it has almost the same performance at a much lower cost.

Another point is that the 5960x can be overclocked, on air cooling it easily runs at 4.4GHz., the e5-1660-v3 does not allow you to do that.

[ernest]

Anyway I'm very happy with the 5960x, it's performance is mind boggling.

Could you describe your new machine ?
Thanks !

[Joost Buijs]

Anyway I'm very happy with the 5960x, it's performance is mind boggling.

Could you describe your new machine ?
Thanks !

Hi, I really don't know what to describe.

It is an Asus X99 Deluxe mainboard with a core I7-5960x and 8 sticks Corsair Vengeance-LP DDR4 from 4GB each.
I just replaced the old mainboard which had an I7-3960x on it.
The case, PSU, hard disks and video card are reused from the old machine.

For chess the performance of the 5960x is about 1,5x the performance of the 3960x.

[syzygy]

For chess the performance of the 5960x is about 1,5x the performance of the 3960x.

Both clocked at 4.4 Ghz?

4.4 Ghz for the 8-core 5960x seems excellent.

[Joost Buijs]

For chess the performance of the 5960x is about 1,5x the performance of the 3960x.

Both clocked at 4.4 Ghz?

4.4 Ghz for the 8-core 5960x seems excellent.

When I compared them they were both clocked at 4.0 GHz. Of course 33% of the performance increase is due to the core count and the other 17% is probably due to improvement in architecture. With my own engine I measure an increase of roughly 50% in n/s. but this can be different for other engines.

I run the 5960x on 4.2 GHz. with air cooling (Noctua NH-D15), at full load the temperature stays below 60 deg. C. Above 4.2 GHz. it starts to warm up very rapidly. At 4.4 GHz. the temperature is already ~70 deg. C.
Idle it runs very cool, about 8 deg. C. above room temperature. The 3960x is getting much warmer when idle.

[ernest]

It is an Asus X99 Deluxe mainboard with a core I7-5960x and 8 sticks Corsair Vengeance-LP DDR4 from 4GB each.

Thanks !