Hardware Recommendations - Chess Analysis

[dangi12012]

I'm not happy with the direction the industry is moving. The midrange models should be more reasonable, but the high-end is becoming insane: driven by marketing to look good in benchmarks at all costs. This collective strive for the el-cheapo solution of cranking up power consumption to fake progress also suggests that the actual progress, i.e. at the same or lower power consumption, isn't all that impressive anymore. In turn, it may be attractive to use the Zen 4 release only to get Zen 3 at a discount.

That's not true - you can check out gamers Nexus for a Watt per Watt comparison.
They turn at all knobs simultaneously while also increasing maximum power. That's what competition demands. Mind you that cooling even only 140W was impossible a few years back so the IHS has become a lot thinner.
The same is happening on the GPU side with Nvidia/Amd. Power increases while watt/watt the hardware is also more efficient.
Power obviously has a limit in the consumer space which was already reached in the past with products like the R295X.

[Ras]

They turn at all knobs simultaneously while also increasing maximum power.

Yeah, that's what I meant: the actual progress isn't that impressive anymore, that's while they also crank up the power in order to fake progress. Zen4 in particular looks disappointing, given that AMD has made a full node jump from TSMC N7 to N5.

[dangi12012]

They turn at all knobs simultaneously while also increasing maximum power.

Yeah, that's what I meant: the actual progress isn't that impressive anymore, that's while they also crank up the power in order to fake progress. Zen4 in particular looks disappointing, given that AMD has made a full node jump from TSMC N7 to N5.

I really hope Zen4 comes with these:
https://builders.intel.com/docs/network ... -guide.pdf
Since working on an 8x8 binary matrix in infinitely more flexible than working on a single uint64_t.

Its very likely (only leaks so far) that these instructions are the AVX512 instructions AMD was refering to in their slides:
https://networkbuilders.intel.com/solut ... logy-guide

So this is what I am looking forward in Zen4 (together with faster memory)

[CornfedForever]

They turn at all knobs simultaneously while also increasing maximum power.

Yeah, that's what I meant: the actual progress isn't that impressive anymore, that's while they also crank up the power in order to fake progress. Zen4 in particular looks disappointing, given that AMD has made a full node jump from TSMC N7 to N5.

I see so many posts here indicating NPS is king when it comes to chess (engines anyway). That being the case, it's always a bit ironic to see someone (and not you specifically, just generally speaking) who would turn up their nose at all the extra juicy (crispy??) NPS these new and faster upcoming AMD (and Intel) CPU's will gift to you...however it came wrapped.

[Vinvin]

Now, I do see where with all that gain...comes a lot of wattage as well. Peak Power for the AM5 socket goes up to 230 W from the current 142 W. That's...AMD building their new house right beside Intel's in the middle of the Arizona desert.

I see 170 Watts for the 16 cores processors. Power consumption stills way under Intel for the same CPU performance.

Here is were I likely saw that: "up to 170W TDP,230W peak power": https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-z ... know-specs

I am hoping the price out of the gate (well within a month or so of it) is tempered by Intel's Gen 13 releasing about the same time. Competition is always good for the consumer.

Zen 4 processors would have >25% performance-per-watt and >35% overall performance improvements.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-z ... mance-gain

[Magnum]

I see 170 Watts for the 16 cores processors.

There was some confusion initially because AMD, as they confirmed later, micsommunicated the 170W as peak power instead of TDP. Their peak power is usually 35% above their TDP marketing number, which then gives the 230W.

Btw., the higher than 16 core counts that I mentioned seem to be outdated leaks, and more recent sources stick indeed to 16 cores. 16 cores, but ramping up the power to 230W would be a rather disappointing move from AMD. Intels 12900K power draw isn't a good, but a bad example that it seems AMD chose to copy. Reducing that power limit in the BIOS should be possible, but that would only leave the IPC (instructions per clock) uplift, and then the price-to-performance ratio of the Zen4 platform would become questionable, in particular with the expensive high-end CPU model.

Something similar is also happening on the GPU front where the upcoming Nvidia top model is said to be at 450W+, and AMD may follow suit. Even worse, the peak power draw of GPUs is between two and three times the nominal power, which would require a 1200W+ PSU, or make the lower rated PSUs more expensive so that they can deal with such enormous power demand spikes.

I'm not happy with the direction the industry is moving. The midrange models should be more reasonable, but the high-end is becoming insane: driven by marketing to look good in benchmarks at all costs. This collective strive for the el-cheapo solution of cranking up power consumption to fake progress also suggests that the actual progress, i.e. at the same or lower power consumption, isn't all that impressive anymore. In turn, it may be attractive to use the Zen 4 release only to get Zen 3 at a discount.

Thx for the great news
It sounds like everybody will use Apple devices for chess.

[Ras]

I see so many posts here indicating NPS is king when it comes to chess (engines anyway).

NPS is good, core split is bad. If you can have the same NPS either with a single fast core or with two slower cores, the former is always better. That's pretty obvious when considering how multithreading works in chess engines.

It sounds like everybody will use Apple devices for chess.

Tied to a proprietary OS and a proprietary HW scam where a measly 256GB of flash are more expensive than a complete 2TB SSD on the free market? No way.

[smatovic]

Thx for the great news
It sounds like everybody will use Apple devices for chess.

????

https://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=79229

--
Srdja

[Vinvin]

More numbers and official announce :

Now, I do see where with all that gain...comes a lot of wattage as well. Peak Power for the AM5 socket goes up to 230 W from the current 142 W. That's...AMD building their new house right beside Intel's in the middle of the Arizona desert.

I see 170 Watts for the 16 cores processors. Power consumption stills way under Intel for the same CPU performance.

Here is were I likely saw that: "up to 170W TDP,230W peak power": https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-z ... know-specs

I am hoping the price out of the gate (well within a month or so of it) is tempered by Intel's Gen 13 releasing about the same time. Competition is always good for the consumer.

Zen 4 processors would have >25% performance-per-watt and >35% overall performance improvements.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-z ... mance-gain

[dangi12012]

For people who are interested in pushing whats not implemented yet. (Breadth first search, very memory intensive)

This is the way to do it with memory-mapped files:
https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Press/News/2018

Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 AIC Adaptor will be able to read/write with 60GB/s and this is faster in terms of bandwith than DDR3!
Together with ZEN4 (Bfloat16 support) there are many many opportunities to invent something new.

To not feel any latency you have to use the SSE cache-bypass store instruction when expanding the search and keep Zobrist hashes in memory.
The disadvantages of breadth first search seem to be dissolving from 2020 - 2030.