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."

Comments

Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed?

[ciroknight]

This is sorta true, but the P4 was an excercize to see where AMD would go. By making chips that they knew would be really fast once they got the foundation down, they drove AMD to finding a way out. My guess is that Intel was trying to drive them into a corner since they couldn't build an Itanium-compatible processor without a license, but instead AMD knew when they were beat and decided to move on to a higher playing field.

Like this delicate game of chess, Intel's next move is uncertain. While the P4 has what is needed to smoke the Athlon for years (just as long as they keep tweaking the predication engine and improve on branch prediction's accuracy), it can't really compete with Opteron. Neither can Itanium. Intel just hasn't invested enough in the future since they were ruling the present. I even read somewhere that they had started Williamette and Itanium (forgot the codename) at nearly the same time back in 95? but neither really caught their supervisors eyes since they were more than profittable already. So in short, Intel's game of chess has been too passive for too long. And it's not time to look back on the P3 and say what is good... the P4 is something completely new, like the pentium one was so long ago. Give it some time and it will vastly out perform the P3 comparitively, but you have to realize that the P3 is something like 6 years old, and the Athlon even older than that.... It's time people stop trolling on how past processors were faster comparitively and move on to making the new processors faster. Borrowing from the old is ok.. Look at Banias for example.. but we seriously need to worry about the future more. But thanks for trolling on by.

Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed?

[Ralph Wiggam]

IIRC, the P3 was the end of the Pentium Pro core family. The P4 is the beginning of a new core. So, yes, the first P4s were not the best chips and the P3s of the same time were better buys. But do you remember the P-Pro? Give them a few years of refinement and then judge the core.

-B

Re:It comes as no supprise that he used Dual Xenon

[sn00ker]

You will only see a benefit if the software is multi-threaded. A process with a single thread will not be able to take advantage of multi-processor systems.
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.

XP vs 2000 in the application (Hyperthreading)

[Akai]

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...

Mac attack

[mnemonic_]

Pentium 4 clock speed vs. performance discussion...

Seconds before G3, G4 or PPC970 is mentioned:
3...

Re:P3 faster then P4 at same clock speed?

[drinkypoo]

So the question is, is all this shit worth it, or would it be better for both companies to be building CPUs which were capable both of quick operations and wide execution, perhaps with multiple cores? Maybe someone could make a machine that had disparate popular processors to execute different types of code, and an OS that would run modules using those cores in different threads.

Of course there's always the notion that we should be using asynchronous logic now, anyway; That logic has sped up to the point where it is not actually important to have everything happen on the same clock, but instead more useful to have it occur as rapidly as possible.

As for your automotive analogy, the primary reason that it seems that doing things the Japanese way is practical is that you keep the weight down, which is good from the standpoint that your handling improves and you simply have less weight to push around. On the other hand, a large engine need not necessarily be heavier than a small one. The primary advantage today (it seems to me) is that it ends up being cheaper on gas to run the smaller motor, but of course the more power you use, the more fuel you throw down the thing. Larger cars can be much lighter now than they used to be, though, what with aluminum getting cheap and high strength steel being readily available, not to mention that monocoque technology has moved along nicely with all this computer modeling.

Anyway aside from that digression; I don't think either company really has the win here, just like small engines and large engines are interesting for different reasons, though you can certainly get more power out of larger engines... It only becomes more expensive at a certain point. Of course, Intel's processors are artificially expensive, simply because people pay for them; AMD's are as well, though to a lesser extent. Silly analogies :(