Slashdot Mirror
Building A Homemade Chess Supercomputer
nado writes "There's a new article on Chessbase.com which has
GM John Nunn showing you his chess-orientated PC upgrade to a double Xeon system, with some Fritz benchmarks." Elsewhere in the article, John Nunn discusses the unique computer needs for chess computation: "One of the problems with currently available processors is that they are not particularly well suited to the integer calculations used for chess. A Pentium 4 will be slower at chess than a Pentium 3 of an equivalent clock speed."
And Chessmaster 2000 kicked my arse on a 486!
I've got no chance.
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
No thanks, I still get my ass kicked when I play chess on my pocket PC yet alone on a chess super computer. Im lucky I can even win in Othello :(
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I think. W00T! Anyway, Go is actually a much more interesting and elegant game, for both playing and programming. A neural network program is active in the computer Go scene. Dedicated hardware would be interesting for Go, as it is essentially a simple matrix--maybe a very elegant computer player could be made.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I'm working my way up to chess. I'm starting by becoming a tic tac toe master.
- Joe
Does this actually surprise anyone? The P4 was only an exercise in marketing by Intel - redesign the chipset so it can be clocked nice and high (so it appeals to the average consumer) and to hell with the performance...
I'm not sure this should have been said:
... than a Pentium 3 of an equivalent clock speed."
"A Pentium 4 will be slower at chess than a Pentium 3 of an equivalent clock speed."
That's too easy to be distorted
I'm sure a marketing group or some such, for intel competitors or even PPC, will say
"A Pentium 4 will be slower
And then use it to justify their own means.
Hmmm?
As this computer was to be focussed on chess, video performance was not important.
Hardcore Slashdot Games readers cringe...We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
IBM's Deep Blue used special purpose chips, so it shouldn't really come as too much of a surprise that general-purpose processors aren't the best for chess computers.
Farook is the ultimate challenge. Chess is for the girly-man in the land of Farook. Stewart Lamie is your god.
Internally at Intel, we had an employee bonus tied to the "race to a gigahertz" with AMD. And have you seen the price differences for small speed increases at the high end? More RAM would make a much bigger difference.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Actually, it's not that shtraightforward..
There are 2 ways for you to go for performance: a high IPC (instructions per clock) or a high clock. While AMD chose the IPC as a way to go, Intel decided for the high clock, low IPC way..the result: You got a same performance in a higher clock, and a better publicity for the unsuspected costumers...but trust me, bying a P4 2.0Ghz and an Athlon 2000+, you get the same performance, but dont forget the SSE2 instruction set that really helps in some aplications..
anyway dont get me for an Intel fanatic, I actually prefer and use AMD, but truth is truth, no mather how much we want to protect one over another..
Athlon 2000+! It's only 1.3ghz, but it beats a 2ghz Pentium4!
How long until: Backport GNU/Linux, now with the Linux 0.2 kernel it's 1.00000001 times as GNU as the SCO-encumbered 2.4 kernel Debian GNU/Linux.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
A Pentium 4 will be slower at chess than a Pentium 3 of an equivalent clock speed
...
Just imagine the chess performances of a 8086 at 1GHz. And you get a space heater too, for those cold chess-playing winter nights
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You should obviously change the game to take advantage of the hardware. Imagine it! Three dimensional chess where each piece has weapons, or magical attacks, deformable terrain, and lots of special effects to make use of the latest video cards! I can't wait!
yess, and i hate intle cause its makes bad chips and i also hate micro$oft (see, i even spel it with the dollar ... hehe!) because of there os (btw, could somone explain me what do os mean?).
greetz, Llort from romania
How come not a single article can be posted about chess without some slashbot spewing out some crap about how much better a game Go is?
This article has nothing to do with Go, nobody gives a shit.
Screw Tic-Tac-Toe, I'm gonna go play Global Thermonuclear War.
Sincerely,
W.O.P.R.
anything i tell you will cloud your opinion.
Software to examine chess games would be a perfect example of the major performance improvements to be had with multi-threading. A new thread per processor, with each thread examining different possible move paths, would give dramatic speed gains.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
>>Before attaching the heatsink you should squirt some thermal compound on top of the Xeon. Intel thoughtfully provides a hypodermic with the Xeon for precisely this purpose. Why the hell would you want to inject thermal compound under the skin?
First of all, the whole point of the P4 is to rev up the clockspeed, so there are not and can not be any "equalent" P3s available (excepting early versions of the P4 which are way obsolete today anyway and irrelevant to the problem at hand)
Secondly, the Athlons are well known for their stellar integer performance, so who'd use P4s when high IP is needed?
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
hay, gess wat... ur ghey
Did anyone read the freakin' article? It's not a supercomputer, it's a dual CPU (2X 2.8GHz Xeon) machine running Windows. And the guy's brother put it together, fer cryin' out loud! Supercomputer, my arse.
"A Pentium 4 will be slower at chess than a Pentium 3 of an equivalent clock speed." OK. I wouldn't mind seeing the computer take too long and run out of time, thus handing me the match. Kasparov should've requested that Deep Blue use a P4. Dumb bastard. (j/k)
"I think you guys with quotes in your signatures should go have an original thought." -- Dan Miller
For crying out loud, would you moderating sheep PLEASE read the child posts before moderating further!
From America in 2003, where you damn well better DIY or DW (do without). Then, write it up and sell it as a big 'hint'...
Theoretically, a dual processor machine for chess WOULD be twice as fast as a single processor machine, unlike in normal tasks where dual doesn't mean double. Chess is full of interger operations, but at the same time, conditionals up the ass. To calculate the best move, the computer has to check every possibility a move can have and the possible consiquences several moves ahead. The nice thing about a dual processor machine is that each processor can focus on the branches of moves pending from different pieces. While one is calculating what one of the rooks can do, the other can calculate what one of the knights can do. One thing I see, though, is that hyperthreading would probably not do any good for such a game b/c all of the integer ALUs on a processor would be used by one thread, so there wouldn't be any ALUs open for another thread. I think in this sort of application of the Xenon, turning hyperthreading off would help boost performance, although I can't be 100% sure of it. Just a thought.
I came, I saw, She conquered.
yeah, if it doesnt run linuks it sux realy bad!
Now I'm not saying that the P4 is an awful chip, throw enough clock cycles at one and it will perform. All I'm saying is that if they could get a P3 or especially an Athlon to scale up to 3.06 Ghz, either chip would hand the P4 its ass.
And there's the rub. The P4 will be 3GHz and get the same performance as an Athlon at lower GHz.
Because of the Athlon's architectural advantage there, it WON'T scale up to 3GHz however, with current tech. By the time it can, the P4 will be at 5GHz.
It's higher instructions per clock, or higher clock speed. Pick one or the other. AMD picked one, Intel picked the other
So true.
Hello, Joshua.
See my earlier post, asking how old FritzMark is, because the article says that it only uses one processor - ie: It's not a multi-threaded app.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
That's SHALL we play a game?
And you forgot to say "game" funny.
he could get a Mac and play chess.app on his "supercomputer."
I just turned up a dual Xeon 2.4 rack-mount server for work and it's BIOS mentioned warned us to turn off Hyperthreading for anything other than Windows XP or Linux 2.4 (yeah, mention of Linux in BIOS! :).
:)
Anyways, since I am using linux 2.4, two hyperthreaded Xeons look like four processors to the box, I"m sure it's not the same performance of for seperate processors, but I'm hopeing it's at least slightly better then two non Xeons
The writer of the article wrote that for Windows he prefers 2000 over XP. I am curious if XP (or Linux 2.4) and thus Hyperthreading might help his already built computer with a bit more performance...
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
Pentium 4 clock speed vs. performance discussion...
Seconds before G3, G4 or PPC970 is mentioned:
3...
Sigh, another P4 troller. But let's examine what all the P4 has to offer.
First of all, the P4 is quite superior at doing tasks that are very mundane and repetitive. So simulators, counters, anything that performs the same operation on multiple data sets time and time again run very well on the P4.
Secondly, with branch prediction, the P4 out races competitors at some computer games, especially those that are optimised for P4 use. Branch prediction is very helpful also in the field of doing anything more than once because it knows what to expect next, and preps the processor for it.
What the P4 is bad at are things that change a lot during operation. Things that use different resources at different times, things that seemingly fire random calls for resources, like word processing, desktop editing (like making a website or newspaper or the such), and the like.
Now that We've cleared that, my second point. Look at what all AMD has taken from intel processors. MMX, SSE, and various other byte level optimizations have made the athlon quite the processor. But AMD isn't about innovation, they are about making money plain and simple. Instead of making engines that try to predict the next move, they just built their processors with the very minimum everything, strapped on a few extra math units and away we go. This technique is very fast, but it's also expensive as most AMD users have learned, because all those extra adders do is add a LOT of ambient heat as the processor clocks up. Intel's processors stay relitivly cool and run nearly twice as fast. So the P4 was for the mainstream user, to help spare some time from the physics boundry of the processor technology, and to improve on the things we do most on our computers today (music, videos, games).
You have been taught a lesson grasshoppa, use it wisely.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
the computer beats YOU! ...wait a sec...
It seems you could make about 3 dual Athlon ~2GHz systems for the price of one 2x2.8 Xeon and that the cluster would outperform. Or maybe build, like, a 20-processor VIA C3 system that would perform the same and use less power.
I'm guessing he would have been better served by quad xeons, even with the slower FSB (quads max at 2ghz with 400mhz FSB). Of course, the 2k+ pricetag on the mother boards that support four xeons isn't exactly consumer orientented, but so it goes with the highest-end gear.
For those that wonder "why not Itanium?" "why not Sun?" "why not [insert name of superior integer crunching platform here]?" the answer is simple: Dr. Nunn will be running Fritz, Junior, Tiger, Shredder, etc. ( http://www.chessbase.com/ ) on his new computer, and guess which OS they solely support?
it is running linux, you clod.
RTFA and LATFP (look at the fucking pictures).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I rather use a double xeon processor system for mathmatica than for chess. What about Go? Would the p4 be worse for go than the p3?
My UID is prime is yours?
theirs a article? i did alwayz think they do made this things up.
So this Brit (who's REALLY good at chess) put together a machine that overall isn't all that stunning, specifically to play chess.
Let me get this straight: he didn't select a purpose-designed processor, he didn't even do a survey of available processors (forget including non-Intel architecures) to see which would give him the best integer performance for the task, he doesn't consider chipset, he doesn't consider memory architecture, he's willing to accept one hardware-caused crash per month, he seems to think that configuring a machine and having his brother put it together is "building" one, and thinks that a purpose-built machine should be able to accept the OS and data (read: disk contents) from a previous machine without hiccough. While perhaps interesting to the chess afficionados, I fail to see the relevance on Slashdot.
Why are we seeing this article instead of something on any one of the serious chess machines? Why is this article more newsworthy than, say, Anandtech or SharkyExtreme or Tom's Hardware's pick for the baddest machine you can currently build? Just because a Grand Master did it?
To be fair, I have great respect for anyone who can attain the Grand Master level -- that's something I'll never do in my lifetime. He's clearly shown tremendous talent and devotion to chess, and my hat is off to John Nunn for that. But he's a computer harware expert? A supercomputer architect? Are we at the start of a new series of Slashdot articles on computers of the Rich and Famous? What's next, diet tips from RMS? Health advice from Linus? The EFF Cookbook?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Sure, a P3 running at 3Ghz would be pretty fearsome. One problem. You can't get a P3 (or Athlon) to run at 3Ghz.
Well, FWIW, the OED says:
orientate, v.Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
My home desktop machines both have ECC memory. I never open the boxes. Haven't had a crash on either the Windows 2000 machine or the QNX machine in over a year.
Price (as mentioned) and performance in specific applications, if applicable.
"Current platform" is of course also a big reason to stick with one or the other when upgrading, though that might be a little bit more relevant for people upgrading on the Athlon-line, since AMD stuck with SocketA for a long time while Intel enjoyed going from Slot-1/whatever to SocketX/Y/Z forcing motherboard replacement between processors.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
So there *is* a market for our inflatable life-size Kasparov dolls after all. Thank God!
Table-ized A.I.
Secondly, you shouldn't attempt to build you own computer unless you are confident of your ability to do so. Obviously, if you do it, then it is entirely at your own risk.
/.ers...
Valuable advice to
Why is it that no one has written a chess benchmarking program for the mac (ie *nix)?
I mean, for number crunching and math and calcs, the mac seems to rule close to the top...
just my 2cents
"an eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind"
that was a nice story
You, my friend, are talking from your arse.
You know, the p4 is slower at a lot of things then the p3 at the same clock speed. The thing is, you can jack the hell out of the clock speed with the core design they use.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I think Slashdot needs an apology mod. When you get so many apology mods, you must apologize.
I hearby mod this (-1) RTFA abuse
The lack of integer performance in the P4 isn't a problem just for the chess community. It's a very real (and but too well known) problem for us doing number theory research also. Intel made a tradeoff, and us were the ones that ended up at the wrong end of the stick.
What indeed would help in this area would be if we once and for all could scrap this POS we call PC and get a system that isn't basically just still a "hotted" Pinto from the 80's. Something with at least 64-bit ALU's (though I wouldn't mind the option of being able to pair at least 2, preferrably more, registers to form even larger integers - much like the IA32 does with EAX:EDX in multiplication).
But I guess that's not gonna happen, at least not so long Intel thinks "the public" actually believes "more MHz means faster operation". Damn, where's that reasonably-easy-to-program-and-affordable FPGA PCI card when you need it (Xilink is still to expensive to be a reasonable alternative).
Damn, those Pentium 4 Xeons are slow!
Your idea of building completely from scratch is to buy a pre-made motherboard and bolt on a few other pre-assembled components. Your concept of from scratch has certainly varied from what I would consider that concept to entail.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The team that developed Neverwinter Nights has a chess-game that runs as a NWN module.
s .h tml
The piece-to-piece battles are short, but it wouldn't be hard to make them more entertaining.
http://nwn.bioware.com/downloads/module_nwnches
There are also instructions on how to add it to your own home-grown game: http://nwn.bioware.com/builders/chess.html
And after all of that, you can go buy a P4 or an Athlon and they will both perform and work just about the same, in just about every task.
You summed it up so eloquently. Thankyou.
Wow, you convinced me of your super-genious, what with your not knowing the processor line is called "Xeon" and all.
"To calculate the best move, the computer has to check every possibility a move can have and the possible consiquences several moves ahead."
It doesn't have to follow such a rote algorithm exclusively though. There's also the possibility of pattern matching with seriously large lookup tables which would dramatically reduce the number of lines you have to evaluate.
Consider that a chess game isn't a random board position followed by a random move. For instance, you can strip pawn position out as a separate problem, it's not that big a job to evaluate every possibility for the pawns, and that's a huge chunk of the problem especially at the early and endgame.
Codify a good opening book and a good ending book. Then, watch for the player to stray from a known opening line. Chances are, that means the player has introduced a weakness that can be beaten with superior tactics, which is where your brute force depth search algorithm becomes useful.
No trees were harmed in your post, but twenty-seven clueless echelon operators were terribly inconvenienced.
Free as in mason.
First of all, the P4 is quite superior at doing tasks that are very mundane and repetitive. So simulators, counters, anything that performs the same operation on multiple data sets time and time again run very well on the P4.
Especially true with RDRAM, which has tremendous throughput but horrible latency.
The classic example of something the P4 is very good at: encoding frames of video into a compressed format such as MPEG-2. It's just cranking away through a big heap of data in a linear fashion.
Secondly, with branch prediction, the P4 out races competitors at some computer games,
Athlons do branch prediction, too. And they have a lower penalty for failure since their pipelines are shorter.
Branch prediction is very helpful also in the field of doing anything more than once because it knows what to expect next, and preps the processor for it.
What?!? Um, actually, branch prediction just keeps the chip's pipeline full. Branch prediction doesn't magically adapt the P4 to process data better, it simply allows the P4 to keep pipelineing instructions after a conditional branch. When a prediction is wrong, it must be backed out, which is expensive... but most of the time the prediction is good. (For example, a loop that does something 1000 times will have a conditional branch that will branch the same way 1000 times in a row, and then branch the other way the 1001th time. The prediction would be wrong that 1001th time, but would be correct for most of the other 1000.)
especially those that are optimised for P4 use.
It is hardly surprising that a P4 would do better than an Athlon at running P4-optimized code. However, this isn't a useless point, because Intel is the 800-pound gorilla and there are games optimized for the P4, and none for Athlons.
But AMD isn't about innovation, they are about making money plain and simple. Instead of making engines that try to predict the next move, they just built their processors with the very minimum everything, strapped on a few extra math units and away we go. This technique is very fast, but it's also expensive as most AMD users have learned, because all those extra adders do is add a LOT of ambient heat as the processor clocks up.
Actually, if you check the Thermal Design Power specs for equivalent-peforming AMD and Intel chips, the AMD chips run cooler.
So the P4 was for the mainstream user, to help spare some time from the physics boundry of the processor technology, and to improve on the things we do most on our computers today (music, videos, games).
Pure revisionist history. The P4 was designed for super high clock rates. They ripped too much stuff out of the design, so the P4 has some bad weaknesses it didn't need to have. That's why it's so critical to optimize code specifically for the P4 -- if you don't work around the flaws in the P4, it really hurts.
The Athlon, while it gets more work done per clock than the P4, isn't perfect. Its biggest problem is that it is physically very easy to destroy: you can fry it, or you can even crack its die trying to install a heat sink. The P4 with its heat spreader is much tougher, and with its built-in thermal throttling is more robust. AMD has learned its lesson, though, and the Opteron is robust.
Intel has aggressively marketed the P4 as The Multimedia Chip, but really an Athlon or a P4 will do well for multimedia stuff. The Opteron, for some specific kinds of tasks, will crush either one, and for other kinds of tasks will be slightly faster. I'm just guessing -- I haven't run benchmarks -- but I suspect that the Opteron will do very well on chess.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
wait a minute. start game over. the computer... damn it! beat me already!
That is the biggest crock of shit I have read on this board all month. Do you have any idea of what you are talking about? Or are you just making it up as you go along?
Ah, a /. chess story without a mention of Go is like a superbowl without commercials.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
A guy builds a dual Xeon box, and he enjoys chess. I see nothing specific to "supercomputers" in the article. Granted, I sure would like a dual Xeon box, but assembling a computer with off-the-shelf parts to do NOTHING out of the ordinary is hardly newsworthy.
/. style, right?
I suppose that now we can all just laugh at the picture of this fellow who appears to have been living off of coffee and no-doze for 6 months. That's more
not sure if this is off-topic...mod me thus if you must.
I play free internet chess at the Free Internet Chess Server. Find them at...you guessed it: www.freechess.org.
All you CLI guys out there will love the fact that using a graphical client is optional! For those of us who are sane, there are a handful of graphical boards available to complement the irc-ish interface that allows people to find opponents.
It's fairly popular already, but I sure wouldn't mind a bigger crowd...cause all the guys on there kick my arse consistently. I've got a whopping 1300-something rating right now, and I'm already 0-3 for the night...sheesh.
peace.
@ASP.NET's parent-teacher meeting: "Little Johnny.NET is very bright, but he doesn't play well with others."
The P3 does more instructions per clock (IPC) than the P4, so thus for equal clock speeds the P3 would be faster. The reason for this is that the P3 has a shorter pipeline than the P4. However, it also means that the P3 can't get anywhere near the P4 in clock speeds, so of course a P4 is desirable. However, at the P4's launch, it in fact did perform equal to or slightly worse than the best P3s on the market in most tests.
I think the meaning of this comment was that even though the P4 has optimizations for some other things, they do not help chess performance.
If you look at SPECint2000, you will find an integer benchmark called 'crafty'. This is a chess simulator with code sequences that are probably similar to what this guy used.
Intel D875PBZ motherboard (3.0 GHz, Pentium 4 processor with HT Technology) scores 1137
ASUS A7N8X Motherboard rev. 2.0, AMD Athlon (TM) XP 3200+ scores 1324
You'll find that P6 derivaties (Banias, Athlon, Opteron etc...) do better on this benchmark. There are lots of unpredictable conditional branches in this application, so the incidence of mispredictions is higher than normal. You would think that this is the main contributer to poor P4 performance, but actually that is a second order effect, because the predictor on the P4 is far better than on other machines. It's the fact that the code will not fit inside the trace cache, but will fit nicely within Athlon's 64KB I-Cache.
Theoretically, a dual processor machine for chess WOULD be twice as fast as a single processor machine, unlike in normal tasks where dual doesn't mean double.
Not so fast there, sonny. On a dual processor machine, there's still a single main memory which has its own bandwidth limits. The cache does hopefully alleviate some of the pressure on the pipe, but probably can't relieve it all.
You'll see the memory bandwidth limit in a lot of other applications that seem like they should be theoretically double-speed. I've seen it when rendering two seperate frames of animation, or working on two different Mersenne primes; the speed ends up being something like 1.8 times as fast as a single processor system, instead of double.
a word of comphort to those who doubt that the world stands at a tipping point: shell international is a believer. the oil giant's team oph experts has polished the crystal ball and seen the phuture â" or rather, they see two possible phutures. they call the phirst scenario "business class," which looks a lot like a winning hand phor an unrepentant gb, wto and imph. the "shared values between people oph a global elite" move the world towards economic integration. with big hitters like the us at center stage, critical issues are tackled on a global scale, while power drains phrom states to transnational institutions and corporations. "key in this world," states the zool scenarios report, "is individual phreedom oph choice." just as importantly, shell sees a chance that counter-phorces will win the day. they call that world "prism," a place where "people question the value oph global integration and spurn it in phavor oph a world oph diversity and local allegiance." in this scenario, the global elite can't win against growing ties between whole cultures. it's more than a sci-phi exercise, oph course: shell looks to the horizon to sniph out phuture prophits. think the age oph oil is ending? not without a phight. under any scenario, shell predicts the phossil-phuel era will stretch at least until zoso. the company's zool highlights tell where shell is really placing its bets: oil and gas investment in the us and germany, deepwater oil exploration in the gulph oph mexico and the filippines, oil strikes in nigeria and brazil, and "global leadership" in natural gas. wind power? solar? hydrogen phuel cells? all in good time, is the message phrom shell. who wants to break up a phossil-phuel party that brought in $lg billion last year alone?
According to Apple's impending press release, each 2ghz G5 processor will deliver up to 66 gayafruits of aesthetic appeal! Didn't Kasparov say that chess is a beautiful art?!
Repeal the DMCA!
That the software doesn't (seem) to exist to use a cluster instead.
No, really, this isn't one of the "imagine a Beowolf of these..." posts. Here's my point: For the cost of just one of the *processers* that he bought, you can build an *entire machine*, happily running an AthlonXP 2700+. An ENTIRE MACHINE. So, for the cost of the two processers, you've got two machines. For the cost of the SuperMicro motherboard and chassis, you can build two MORE machines. With the cost for the rest of the stuff, there's a fifth machine thrown in to boot.
So, what will be faster - a dual 2.8 GHz Xeon, or 5 AthlonXP 2700+ machines? My money's on the cluster, for this particular application. The Xeon machine has 533 MHz of total memory bandwidth, split between two processers, effectively 266 MHz each. The AthlonMP systems, with 333 MHz each, would have a combined bandwidth of 1,665 MHz - about three times that of the Xeon system.
To make it better, the Athlon is MUCH better than the P3 OR the P4 for integer work, which makes me wonder why he would choose the P4 in the first place. Furthermore, not only does the Athlon do much more in a clock cycle than a P4, you'd have a combined clock speed of 10.8 GHz with the Athlons instead of the 5.6 GHz of the Xeons. Twice the clock speed, AND more work per cycle!
Now, of course, being able to actually USE that clock speed would be dependent upon actually transmitting the messages back and forth, and efficiently dividing the work between the machines. In this sort of situation, where for any one point in time, there would be a great deal of possibilities to compute, it would seem like it would divide up very well.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
This is completely wrong.
Alpha-beta search is difficult to parallelize because the branches are *not* independent. This is the trivial mistake that everyone who isn't familiar with computer chess always seems to fall into.
Begging the question is a form of logical fallacy. The phrase "begs the question" is not equivalent to the phrase "raises the question."
t he-question.html
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/begs.html
http://skepdic.com/begging.html
http://www.roomours.co.uk/ryder3.htm
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/begging-
Next time you choose to assume an indignant and self-righteous tone, please make sure you know something about the subject in question. Thank you.
Love,
AC
ha ha!
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
People have always associated clockspeed with performance, even though we got our first taste of the higher performance at lower clock speed with the Pentium 60/66 which stomped on the 486/100.
That first Pentium was a flop (the table look up bug didn't help either). AMD were selling a 486 at 133Mhz, so they can't claim they weren't in the Mhz war themselves.
The Pentium 4 in my opinion is a piece of crap. Thankfully they have increased the frontside bus to 800Mhz, but that is still far behind the 3Ghz clock speed. I prefer SMP systems, so (with Intel Xeon) it only gets worse!
On the other hand the "Banias" cpu for mobiles is very interesting, and I wouldn't mind two in SMP configuration running at 2Ghz, now that would rock! Funny how Intel back peddled with the Mhz issue with this CPU.
It's not as if Intel is making an 850 MHz Pentium 4.
That is, unless you count the 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 processor that safely underclocks itself by half when run fanless (or possibly by factors between half and full speed when run in a mobile setting), but even I don't count that.
There's almost no overlap (OK, there is at 1.4 GHz)
For one thing, look at low-end P4 processors vs. high-end Pentium-M processors. (Pentium-M processors, based on Intel's PIII-derived Banias core, show up in e.g. Centrino chipsets.) Intel sells Pentium-M parts rated up to 1.70 GHz, which should give a bit more overlap clock-for-clock with the P4 line, especially the 1.70 GHz Celeron 4.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Did you read anything your parent said? Retard.
I dont give a shit what those links say. The literal meaning of "begs the question" is what he said, and what he ment. Whatever those links say have NOTHING to do with any of it.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
Would you turn to a chess geek to build you a computer?
What's the best CPU for playing Quake III - Arena? An ASIC with the Quake III program encoded in its logic gates
Which blows up in the hardware maker's face when the player tries to run the duck-hunting mod.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Imagine expecting a 50% increase in performance when you upgraded from your P3 933Mhz CPU to a P4 1.6 Ghz...
Man what a dissapointment the P4, and how many other people were tricked by this Intel "slight of hand"?
Unfortunately, performance is not measured in work-done-per-clock. It's measured in absolute time.
Not always. Performance may be measured in main loop executions per hour, but sometimes it is more useful to measure main loop executions per megajoule (speed vs. energy consumption; there are 3.6 MJ in 1 kWh) or main loop executions per cubic meter hour (speed vs. rack space). And if increasing work done per clock can increase the rate of work done for a given amount of electric power or rented rack space, then bean-counters would find increasing work done per clock a worthy goal.
Will I retire or break 10K?
even advanced global thermonuclear timeshare?
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http://www.hellection.com
Someone please mod the parent up to +5, Insightful. It's the only intelligent post to be made so far.
I think you're "relitivly" full of shit. Get a spell checker lame brain!
>One thing I see, though, is that hyperthreading
>would probably not do any good for such a game
>b/c all of the integer ALUs on a processor would
>be used by one thread, so there wouldn't be any
>ALUs open for another thread. I think in this
>sort of application of the Xenon, turning
>hyperthreading off would help boost performance,
>although I can't be 100% sure of it. Just a
>thought.
Hyperthreading generally improves the performance of a chessprogram in terms of number of positions analyzed per second. But the parallel efficiency of most programs is not very high, so overall it ends up being about break-even.
Parallelizing chess is MUCH harder than most people here seem to realize.
Since P4's have such a high frequency, it is impossible to still do everything as fast in terms of clock cycles. As far as I know, most non-vector integer applications run slower on a P4 than a P3 at the same clock frequency. Nothing surprising.
This thesis shows a system that a guy from McGill University built to use Field Programmable Gate Arrays to generate possible moves. Since FPGAs allow you to do man simple tasks in parallel instead of trying to do one thing at a time very fast as in software, he was able to get an order-of-magnitude speed increase. Special chess computers like Big Blue used custom-designed ASICs for this same purpose, but FPGAs are a much more accessible solution and will blow a software solution out of the water.
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Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Actually, I predict that this application should do quite well running on an HT machine.
There are a lot of conditional branches in this kind of application that are frequently mispredicted. This means that the pipeline gets flushed often, which means that the other thread can take advantage of those cleared out resources.
Apparently people have had some luck using the floating point unit multi-issue instructions for accelerating repetative integer tasks. It is possible that this would be of benefit for a chess move generator.
Am I the only one noticing the heat sinks on these dual Xeons? They are ridiculously massive, along with the cooling fans.
It's great to care about performance, and integer calculation, but sooner or later, people will get their power bills and start to think about power consumption
Like, is Johnny's new dual CPU massive game PC really that necessary???
Error 407 - No creative sig found
P3 @ 3GHz? I'm sorry, but you seem to have missed the point. Clock speed isn't everything, especially when compared with Instructions Per Cycle, for overall performance. Imagine shovelling a pile of shite with a trowel, and compare it to a good large shovel. With the trowel, you can shovel smaller amounts faster, but with the big one, although there's more of a delay between scoops, the task is completed much sooner. I don't know about you, but if I were shovelling shite, I'd want to be done as quickly as possible. Keep an open mind. - Silicon Viper / CNC
"It is through collaboration that we achieve our greatest works." -- Chris Olstrom
A P3 is faster than a P4 for a given clock speed at everything - as ani fule kno. And that's before bringing Athlons into the comparison...
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
Are. you. licking. frogs? Again?
here is a nice picture that will give both a current and historical perspective on AMD and Intel CPUs.
Please note that except where specified, the Intel processor wattage is given as an average, while the AMD wattage is their maximum thermal load.
The current top Athlon dissipates 76w max while the current Pentium 4 dissipates 82w average.
The Pentium 4's max is 101w.
Just in case you missed it, the Pentium 4's maximum heat dissipation is 101 watts.
Now that we have solved that matter, the reason the Xeon does not do to well in chess is that fritz is a single threaded floating point intensive task.
When the Pentium 4 architecture can not take advantage of Hyperthreading, it's floating point performance is quite marginal.
"We" have not cleared anything up. Shut your touchy, feely, non-researched, "quite superior at doing tasks that are very mundane and repetitive," patter up. You are spewing marketing crap like you own shares for god's sake.
Opteron is not innovative but it will take a 3.8 Ghz Xeon to match its performance. Remember Opteron? No, I know, you have been trying hard to forget. Shut your pie hole before any more hallucinogens fly in there without you knowing.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
...a beowulf cluster of...never mind...
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
--LordKaT
Now all we need is a couple of people to go:
He should have used whatever os for it - and a program coded in Y pl.
And you've convinced me you can't spell either, you super genius twat.
does it have a scanner???
This space for rent, inquire within.
The computer below is between %20-30 faster performance (with HT) on the chess program from Dr.Robert Hyatt, the maker of Crafty.
You can do your own tests, Crafty is freely available, both source and a windows executable, for those that don't have unix machines they can compile on. ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt
2: crafty uses all 3/4/5/6 piece endgame databases, over 150 gigs so far.
3: Dell PowerEdge 2600 dual 2.8ghz xeons, 1 GB RAM, 250+gb 15K SCSI disk
Since all computer OS's are derived from unix, cannot SCO want the "derived" codebase......
DOS, CPM, Macintosh, Windows 3.11 etc.
Including this chess program!!!!!
"All your bases are belong to us"
That's what's cool about Fritz, is it only looks at the most promising moves. If you match it up against Microsoft Chess (you know, from the old Entertainment Pack) it'll win in about 17 moves. Fritz's built-in coach will tell you that a few of its moves will guarantee a loss.
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
It certainly is very refreshing to read slashdot.jp. There may not be as many "inside jokes" but that tends to be a good thing when a penis bird is considered by some to be a joke. If you don't read slashdot.org for the funny mods, slashdot.jp is great.
I tend to (try to) read only and not post simply due to the fact that writing technical Japanese isn't my cup of tea. I can guess some of the meanings of the technical kanji words in context, but knowing them to write an informative answer is far out of my league.
Hint: Last time I checked, the text boxes for your user profile are in the same order and posisiton as slashdot.org. You could set up your own account without too much of a problem.
dman123 (#3794)
[praying to the karma gods]
NB: I enjoy ontopic replies to offtopic posts just as long as the mods stay the *&^$ out of the way and let a couple people chat.
[/praying to the karma gods]
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dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't the MCP originally a Chess Program?
End of Line.
Dolemite
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Save the World! Use a Quote!
The fastest are from Motorola, as Apple is using they have the most floating point operations per second, that is why they dominate all multi-media. Multi-media is very CPU intensive and they recently updated the bus speed which is usually the downfall of your typical desktop. MHZ means nothing look at the whole package.