M1 Apple Silicon for Chess?

[acepoint_de]

If he had a M1 Pro 13 inch...

I have one for round about two weeks now, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, around € 1550,-. If it's a sensible, not too much time consuming test, drop me a line and I will post the results here.

BTW, I don't understand these OS/Hardware wars you all are doing here in the forum. And, IMHO you are comparing apples and oranges all the time. Are you guys seriously thinking that a € 3500+ equipment can be beaten by hardware for € 800 (Mini), € 1100 (Air) or € 1500 (Pro)? Or that the main class of customer is someone mainly crunching numbers (letting a chess engine running all the time is nothing but number crunching)?

Ciao

acepoint

PS. I'm not an Apple fanboy. I also use Windows/Linux/FreeBSD (PC) and Android (Tablet, Mobile phone). But my last Notebook was a Mac Book Pro late 2012, bought in 2013 for around € 2500,- , which after nearly eight years still works flawlessly and beats most of todays low cost notebooks in many ways. And, so far I'm impressed by the new M1.

[AlexChess]

Hi!
I have added this script to the json configuration of Igel 2.9.0 and now seems finally strong as the Windows version:

{
"default" : true,
"name" : "Use NNUE",
"type" : "check",
"value" : true
},
{
"default" : "ign-0-9b1937cc",
"name" : "EvalFile",
"type" : "string",
"value" : "ign-0-9b1937cc"
}

Here there is the original NNUE file from the IGEL 2.9.0 author: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkW3Hj0Gl_ewzxT76yf ... s?e=4tzeiV


ChessX and Cutechess for M1 now work fine, but I still prefer BacksiaGUI that I have completely customized. (the default theme is horrible, but the program functionalities are incredibles... https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkW3Hj0Gl_ewzxNioMf ... L?e=GYTbKP

[AlexChess]

If he had a M1 Pro 13 inch...

I have one for round about two weeks now, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, around € 1550,-. If it's a sensible, not too much time consuming test, drop me a line and I will post the results here.

BTW, I don't understand these OS/Hardware wars you all are doing here in the forum. And, IMHO you are comparing apples and oranges all the time. Are you guys seriously thinking that a € 3500+ equipment can be beaten by hardware for € 800 (Mini), € 1100 (Air) or € 1500 (Pro)? Or that the main class of customer is someone mainly crunching numbers (letting a chess engine running all the time is nothing but number crunching)?

Ciao

acepoint

PS. I'm not an Apple fanboy. I also use Windows/Linux/FreeBSD (PC) and Android (Tablet, Mobile phone). But my last Notebook was a Mac Book Pro late 2012, bought in 2013 for around € 2500,- , which after nearly eight years still works flawlessly and beats most of todays low cost notebooks in many ways. And, so far I'm impressed by the new M1.

Me too, I don't have an iPhone (I hate the notch) but a 3 year old Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 updated to Pixel Experience Android 11, and I have (emulated under Parallels M1) Ubuntu 20.04 and Windows 10 ARM64. My old Mac mini 2010 runs perfectly with High Sierra and unsupported @dosdude1 Catalina and the logic board of my iMac 2013 (fast running unsupported Big Sur on external SSD) is just died due to an unstable Chinese powered USB HUB . So I have bought this Mac mini M1 that is really surpring me

[Ckappe]

If he had a M1 Pro 13 inch...

I have one for round about two weeks now, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, around € 1550,-. If it's a sensible, not too much time consuming test, drop me a line and I will post the results here.

BTW, I don't understand these OS/Hardware wars you all are doing here in the forum. And, IMHO you are comparing apples and oranges all the time. Are you guys seriously thinking that a € 3500+ equipment can be beaten by hardware for € 800 (Mini), € 1100 (Air) or € 1500 (Pro)? Or that the main class of customer is someone mainly crunching numbers (letting a chess engine running all the time is nothing but number crunching)?

Ciao

acepoint

PS. I'm not an Apple fanboy. I also use Windows/Linux/FreeBSD (PC) and Android (Tablet, Mobile phone). But my last Notebook was a Mac Book Pro late 2012, bought in 2013 for around € 2500,- , which after nearly eight years still works flawlessly and beats most of todays low cost notebooks in many ways. And, so far I'm impressed by the new M1.

I have never heard anyone defending Apple claiming to be a "fanboy" on these forums

Why do Apple pundits seem to think it's a "war" whenever someone does "real" comparisons and benchmarks (yes Geekbench does not count as a real benchmark ) pointing out that the emperor is naked?

Apple's $3500 laptops don't perform very well either...

For less of the price of the M1 based Macbook "pro" you can get an ASUS A15 Gaming Laptop, 15.6” 144Hz Full HD IPS-Type, AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, GeForce RTX 2060, 16GB DDR4, 1TB PCIe SSD, 90WHr Battery.
It benches better both for SF, Leela can run more chess programs, it cost arounf $1000 and you can even upgrade memory and ssd on it without problems.

Just saying that the value proposal of Apples M1s are not that great.... But they Hypa and "geekbench" groupies are all over the "internets"

[acepoint_de]

a lot of unrelated stuff deleted... (acepoint)

You may either respond to arguments or continue stealing life time. In the latter case EOD for me.

Ciao

acepoint

[Ckappe]

Oh still curious is the ASUS Zeph the laptop you got? I wanna see some other 5900H alternatives.

There are some nice 5900 alternatives.. I got the Zephyrus Duo 15, as i really dig the dual screen (really perfect to have chessboard on main-screen and analysis etc on the duo screen, also godd with a touch screen and don't have to smudge the main screen.

Asus have cheaper 5900 models like the Strix and Flow, if not for the dual screen I would probably have gone for a Legion 7 with Ryzen 9, (aslo have 3080 RTX as alternative) which probably performs amzsing due to Lenovo Legions cooling.

But AMDs newer 5980H will undoubtly also find its way to many laptops and its also a beast If battery-time is really critical the 5800U is probably the best laptop option today.

[BetaPro]

Oh still curious is the ASUS Zeph the laptop you got? I wanna see some other 5900H alternatives.

There are some nice 5900 alternatives.. I got the Zephyrus Duo 15, as i really dig the dual screen (really perfect to have chessboard on main-screen and analysis etc on the duo screen, also godd with a touch screen and don't have to smudge the main screen.

Asus have cheaper 5900 models like the Strix and Flow, if not for the dual screen I would probably have gone for a Legion 7 with Ryzen 9, (aslo have 3080 RTX as alternative) which probably performs amzsing due to Lenovo Legions cooling.

But AMDs newer 5980H will undoubtly also find its way to many laptops and its also a beast If battery-time is really critical the 5800U is probably the best laptop option today.

Yes 5800U will be better for laptops as 5900H is 45W.

When I was working on graphics drivers for those Cezanne parts. I was assigned an issue where QA could only reproduce on 45W parts. But the dev team had those engineering samples where it's hard to tell if it's a 45W or a 15W. I asked the team, and my teammates also didn't know a surefire way to determine that. So we had to go to the product manager who had a list telling us about the specs of each engineering sample..

[AlexChess]

@Acepoint_de Thank you for the new M1 engines Stockfish 13 and SugaR 1.50 (Just added to my preliminary M1 Blitz!!!)
I'll check your repository often

Could you please compile also MikeB's Honey R12? Already Honey XI Intel 64 is doing very well!

Hallo!
AlexChess

[Ckappe]

There are some nice 5900 alternatives.. I got the Zephyrus Duo 15, as i really dig the dual screen (really perfect to have chessboard on main-screen and analysis etc on the duo screen, also godd with a touch screen and don't have to smudge the main screen.

Asus have cheaper 5900 models like the Strix and Flow, if not for the dual screen I would probably have gone for a Legion 7 with Ryzen 9, (aslo have 3080 RTX as alternative) which probably performs amzsing due to Lenovo Legions cooling.

But AMDs newer 5980H will undoubtly also find its way to many laptops and its also a beast If battery-time is really critical the 5800U is probably the best laptop option today.

Yes 5800U will be better for laptops as 5900H is 45W.

When I was working on graphics drivers for those Cezanne parts. I was assigned an issue where QA could only reproduce on 45W parts. But the dev team had those engineering samples where it's hard to tell if it's a 45W or a 15W. I asked the team, and my teammates also didn't know a surefire way to determine that. So we had to go to the product manager who had a list telling us about the specs of each engineering sample..
[/quote]

Better is subjective

As always its a tradeoff Energy consumption and performance (just look at the Wattage of those 3090 GPUs ) .. Personally I don't need the more extreme battery-stamina running a laptop 3x8h working days on one charge. Running it 4-8 hours normal processing when traveling is just fine between charges for me. I'd rather lose the extreme battery stamina than give up top performance of my laptop. As so many laptops these days have 90-99W batteries, the larger batteries can really give "good enough" stamina and still provide the power to run beefier HW even in laptops. For me I'd rather get more done in a shorter period of time and "recharge" rather than get less work done over a longer time-period..

For me personally I think 45W TDP 7nm strikes the perfect balance between power-efficiency this spring.. the current 15W options (Apple published TDP for M1 is 39W btw) are a bit too slow to justify the extra energy savings imop.

[AlexChess]

@acepoint_de Source code of Stockfish-Fat-Fritz 2.0 has been released under GPL 3.0. Is it possible to compile it for mac M1?

https://www.sp-cc.de/index.htm (Both version, commercial and open source already tested)

https://github.com/DanielUranga/Stockfi ... 3426c93c6e