TalkChess.com

[M ANSARI]

I am having terrible stability problems when I force 8 threads. Total BSD's ... haven't seen those in a while. I am now testing other engines to rule out some problem that I might be having with my hardware and so far it seems that the problem is only with SF 1.7 when 8 threads are forced. I actually had a problem setting 8 thread and for some reason it went back to 5 CPU's on F12 GUI. But I removed the engine and installed it again and double checked to see if 8 cpu's are on and it seems that this time all CPU's were working ... but again that seems to cause a BSD after only one or two games in the tourney. I have only managed to play 4 games of a 100 game Silversuite_5_1 match against R3 and have given up because of the hard crashes. Hard to say who is stronger on 8 core but the score was +2 wins to R3 and 2 draws. It does seem that search is much more robust but still there is a lot of yo yo in evaluation jumps.

What I noticed most is that the evaluation of SF 1.7 is very close to R3 ... usually within .10 cp. The older SF had a much larger variation. Not sure if it is due to improved search or due to improved evaluation. All in all seems like a strong release and although I have a feeling it is still a bit weaker than R3, it most definitely will catch R3 in the next release if progress continues at the same rate.