MikeGL wrote:Lyudmil Tsvetkov wrote:MikeGL wrote:clumma wrote:Lyudmil Tsvetkov wrote:Alpha had considerable hardware advantage
... but that has got to be near saturation.
-Carl
Excellent point.
I mean at that hardware, there won't be any fluctuation on the best candidate move by SF8 anyway.
Alpha hardware equivalent was somewhere 1024 standard cores.
How 1024 cores compare with 64 cores?
How scientific is that.
I don't know what saturation you are talking about, from what I read, without fully understanding it, the TPUs are a very different architecture and quite differently affected by general computer chess concepts.
How can you make up such claims when there are not enough data on the PDF file?
TPU instruction set and benchmark was not properly published.
Was only claimed in PDF report that SF8 was on 64 threads (but no clock speed). Was discussed years ago on this forum that clockspeed, including those of the buses,
would trump number of cores.
Would choose a 1-core 4.0 Ghz over 8-cores running at 2.0 GHz with buggy SMP implementation of engine.
I did not read carefully the whole pdf, because from the start I saw it is unreadable.
How can they use 'The modern chess instructor' by Steinitz to improve Alpha?
I read however a number of sites on the Internet, from where it became clear that:
- TPUs are the equivalent of at least 256 normal cores
- TPUs are highly efficient for calculations, and mostly lack the diminishing returns problem of SMP implementations; so that, actually, while SF has been using 64 cores and losing probably half of that hardware to SMP inefficiencies with larger number of cores, Alpha lost almost nothing from its tremendous hardware
So, that, in reality, the hardware difference is not 16/1, as I thought initially, but more like 30/1.
Add to this the early opening advantage Alpha gets due to the simulated book, and conducting the test has been fully meaningless.
Alpha would play not stronger than 1850 on a single core.
Why would I care for such an engine?