playjunior wrote:I wonder who would provide all the engine authors who participate a 40-core machine?
This is not about removing incentives for implementing good parallel search, it just gives a chance to amateurs who don't have 40-core clusters or University chair and funding with 500 core machines to compete. There are 1 billion such regulations in sports like Formula1, so that the rich teams cannot just outspend the poorer ones in a way that the drivers won't matter at all. Here, cars translate to hardware and pilots are the software. Well almost.
And, I think that if you have a really good parallel search compared to competitors, 8 cores would give quite some advantage. Look at scaling difference of Zappa vs engines of the same time.
Analogies are rarely useful in debates like this. Each side chooses an analogy to try and demonstrate that their argument is the right one, and we end up no further ahead. Either there are analogies to fit both sides of the argument, or they actually aren't a good match.
My only reservation is that it can turn out into a "haves" and "have-nots" competition. Not everyone either has the money for the really big hardware or the contacts to obtain the use of it at perhaps no cost.
But the assumption is that everyone can make equally good use of something like a 40-core cluster, which is far from the truth. No, this whole thing is instead all about penalising Rybka. If it was a 2500 rated engine that was using 40 cores, no-one would be in the slightest bit interested. Indeed no-one got terribly excited about the Toga cluster before. It is the fact that the strongest engine in the world happens to have access to it, that is what started this whole thing. It is anti-Rybka.