Summer time - how does your PC cooling solution perform?

[mclane]

If the cooler is bullshit, e.g. the AMD cooler often coming with the CPU is too small, the cpu is not reaching normal speed at all because it always throttles when doing computerchess. It might be working in idle mode or normal game usage. But chess demands full resources.

By using a bigger/better cpu cooler/fan, you can run the cpu in normal speed and even oc.

I am using this company:
https://www.alpenfoehn.de/produkte/cpu- ... sMEALw_wcB

[smatovic]

...
You question might be genuine but it only shows you understand very little about CPU power management. Thermal throttling is power related. Your system will always run with maximum power that the current cooling solution allows. Whether you are generating that power running AVX2 or regular non-vectorized instructions is totally irrelevant. In other words, your question is pretty pointless.

Enlighten me, so there is no differrence in power usage betwen a non NNUE engine running on CPU and NNUE engine with AVX?

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Srdja

You question is equivalent to "What is heavier 1kg of iron or 1kg of feathers?"
Unfortunately you are incapable of grasping this.

I admit, I am not into CPU design and alike, do you say that the ALU-pipelines of a CPU and AVX-pipelines of a CPU utilize the same underlying circuits? So there is no difference which kind of instructions you run?

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Srdja

[Milos]

...
You question might be genuine but it only shows you understand very little about CPU power management. Thermal throttling is power related. Your system will always run with maximum power that the current cooling solution allows. Whether you are generating that power running AVX2 or regular non-vectorized instructions is totally irrelevant. In other words, your question is pretty pointless.

Enlighten me, so there is no differrence in power usage betwen a non NNUE engine running on CPU and NNUE engine with AVX?

--
Srdja

You question is equivalent to "What is heavier 1kg of iron or 1kg of feathers?"
Unfortunately you are incapable of grasping this.

I admit, I am not into CPU design and alike, do you say that the ALU-pipelines of a CPU and AVX-pipelines of a CPU utilize the same underlying circuits? So there is no difference which kind of instructions you run?

--
Srdja

You seriously don't understand. Oh man.
Ok, let me draw it for you one more time.
You have a CPU that has certain TDP, or lets say maximum allowed power before it start throttling back. Lets say it's 120W. Now lets say you put a better cooler and it will allow you to 150W of maximum power consumption before it starts throttling back. How you use those 150W of power is up to you and it is totally irrelevant from the instruction point of view. Whether your are using AVX2 instructions or simply running SuperPi it doesn't matter. You are gonna heat up your room with 150W of power and your CPU is gonna start throttling back once it reaches power consumption of 150W.

What you are trying to ask (but failing to articulate it obviously) is whether you can still run your CPU at the same frequency with NNUE engines as you could with classical ones and answer is no, because AVX2 instructions have longer latency and lower throughput.

[smatovic]

...
You seriously don't understand. Oh man.
Ok, let me draw it for you one more time.
You have a CPU that has certain TDP, or lets say maximum allowed power before it start throttling back. Lets say it's 120W. Now lets say you put a better cooler and it will allow you to 150W of maximum power consumption before it starts throttling back. How you use those 150W of power is up to you and it is totally irrelevant from the instruction point of view. Whether your are using AVX2 instructions or simply running SuperPi it doesn't matter. You are gonna heat up your room with 150W of power and your CPU is gonna start throttling back once it reaches power consumption of 150W.

Obvio.

What you are trying to ask (but failing to articulate it obviously) is whether you can still run your CPU at the same frequency with NNUE engines as you could with classical ones and answer is no, because AVX2 instructions have longer latency and lower throughput.

Hmm, can you elaborate a bit? Does the CPU clock down cos of the AVX instructions - latency and throughput, or does it clock down cos of the power budget reached - thermal throttling?

--
Srdja

[Gerd Isenberg]

...
You seriously don't understand. Oh man.
Ok, let me draw it for you one more time.
You have a CPU that has certain TDP, or lets say maximum allowed power before it start throttling back. Lets say it's 120W. Now lets say you put a better cooler and it will allow you to 150W of maximum power consumption before it starts throttling back. How you use those 150W of power is up to you and it is totally irrelevant from the instruction point of view. Whether your are using AVX2 instructions or simply running SuperPi it doesn't matter. You are gonna heat up your room with 150W of power and your CPU is gonna start throttling back once it reaches power consumption of 150W.

Obvio.

What you are trying to ask (but failing to articulate it obviously) is whether you can still run your CPU at the same frequency with NNUE engines as you could with classical ones and answer is no, because AVX2 instructions have longer latency and lower throughput.

Hmm, can you elaborate a bit? Does the CPU clock down cos of the AVX instructions - latency and throughput, or does it clock down cos of the power budget reached - thermal throttling?

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Srdja

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc ... schlag.pdf

In particular, Intel CPUs with support for AVX2 and AVX-512 instructions often reduce their frequency when these 256-bit and 512-bit SIMD instructions are used in order to prevent excessive power consumption. This frequency reduction often impacts other less power-intensive processes, in which case equal allocation of CPU time results in unequal performance and a substantial lack of performance isolation.

[smatovic]

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc ... schlag.pdf

In particular, Intel CPUs with support for AVX2 and AVX-512 instructions often reduce their frequency when these 256-bit and 512-bit SIMD instructions are used in order to prevent excessive power consumption. This frequency reduction often impacts other less power-intensive processes, in which case equal allocation of CPU time results in unequal performance and a substantial lack of performance isolation.

Thanks, you saved my day.

--
Srdja

[Milos]

Hmm, can you elaborate a bit? Does the CPU clock down cos of the AVX instructions - latency and throughput, or does it clock down cos of the power budget reached - thermal throttling?

--
Srdja

It's mainly power limitation since you activate multiple ALUs in parallel to execute AVX instructions, but also data fetching throughput required for SIMD instructions is too high for a regular clock frequency.

[smatovic]

Hmm, can you elaborate a bit? Does the CPU clock down cos of the AVX instructions - latency and throughput, or does it clock down cos of the power budget reached - thermal throttling?

--
Srdja

It's mainly power limitation since you activate multiple ALUs in parallel to execute AVX instructions, but also data fetching throughput required for SIMD instructions is too high for a regular clock frequency.

Thanks, I guess there are multiple things to consider for NNUE low-level-coders, the paper Gerd linked gives some numbers to get an idea.

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Srdja

[Eelco de Groot]

Yes, If I had to buy something today and not the budget for a Threadripper or something, the Ryzen 7 seems very good value for money, if it was available because the chip shortages seem to delay everything or it is some other bottleneck. Coolblue here in The Netherlands has a nice Ryzen 7 for just 749 Euros, but: coming sooon (as Vas Rajlich would say perhaps). No graphic card other than the on board one Vega graphic card (or is it on chip, don't know for sure) for this 749 Euro system, but that is okay. The bigger graphic cards are terribly expensive! I have never seen separate cases for your graphic cards Thorsten, I must be very out of touch.

The budget system I pointed out above is now finally available! It is not massive hardware of course and for things like Lc0 it is of limited use without any video card installed. But I do hope it can run some because of the builtin Zen 3 for which Tom's Hardware also has some hope for a limited number of games, in the overheated card market. Read the article for more about the 5700G. I'm not into gaming so I can't tell much about that. Videocards are expensive though so for some this may be a solution. Also the featured 5700G is no mean hardware otherwise, for one thing it is a real octacore Of course, it is a bit budget so I don't know if the cooling will hold, if it is overclockable or if the memory is fast enough for chess on many cores. Build your own 5700G system for that.

I won't be buying this one, I had not really expected it to become available soon and it is still not really affordable for me. I already bought some cheaper computer from Coolblue, more a backup in case the Athlon from yesteryear fails and my other computer can't be repaired anymore. It's an i5, real six core but no helperthreads so running Stockfish on six is not really pleasant on the ears and may blow up the chip, cooling is not the most impressive on this. On the plus side, it is really quiet for daily browsing and such, runs a real Windows 10 and cost only 460 Euros (no screen, keyboard or mouse but I had those already). The latest Windows update can cast Ziggo onto a big screen with a Google chromecast, thanks Ted Summers for a post years ago introducing the Google chromecast. As it turns out that was the only way to have television on my big screen, casting it from the Ziggo App on the computer or phone to TV with Chromecast or I have to live with ten meters of coiled coax cable strung out along the floor, or twenty to the living if I want to watch TV there. I still don't watch much TV but I can if I want or maybe somebody who visits wants to watch football or anything, or Max Verstappen in Zandvoort. I feel like I live in Mocano (sic) now, with the GP on on the big screen

[Chessqueen]

For the last 10 years I have been getting Refurbished computers, and I might get this one, but when I really think about it what is the benefit just a few Elo more
https://www.backmarket.com/tested-and-c ... gIqGPD_BwE