M1 Apple Silicon for Chess?

[AlexChess]

Hello Alex!

graphically rude.

I have installed Ubuntu because it is more popular and easier to find debian compiled apps.

The beauty of this whole open-source thing is also, that you - sometimes effort is required fiddling with makefiles etc - can (not) always can compile your own stuff (even the 'system' beneath itself). For Ubuntu I cannot speak, as I do not use it, but I'd guess it's a sufficient choice.

For (computer)chess in Debian I use xboard and scid (but this might be not to your liking). In the past I used to compile scid and xboard (at the time as hgm took xboard to another level and it wasn't in the repositories in Debian).

On macos I did have an install with Fritz 6/8 and Chessbase 9 (last chessbase products I bought) with the help of 'wine' (earlier macports/now brew) and played around with shared/'pirated' versions. Tried Shredder too (good, but not for me)... Otherwise xboard and scid active used exclusively now.

I also had some fun with Lucaschess.

But you are on arm-linux now: everything not precompiled for that platform/actively mainttained cross-platform-code or not being in the repo can pose some problems.

I also have Hight Sierra native (and Catalina patched) on my Mac mini 2010.

Oha! Catalina requires an AFPS+ volume for the starteries, right? Any problems whatsoever? I've got my partitions (ext* for linux and hfs+ for macos encrypted) so I'm afraid everything gets borked.

@acepoint_de

Parallels is for now (did read in their forum; I'm not beta-testing this) out of the question, but thanks. Corellium is making strong progress!


greetings!

Here you can find the guides to patch your unsupported Mac to perfectly work with Catalina (my other hobby together with Android Custom ROMs )
My loved iMac 2013 was running perfectly also with Big Sur patched by MacRumors hackers: http://dosdude1.com/catalina/ (before a Cinese USB 3.0 HUB burned the logic board ...300€ to fix it!),

Is xboard compatible with Linux ARM64? Arena doesn't even start. But now that acepoint_de has kindly compiled for us all the best engines for M1 native I will stay on Mac Silicon forever.. I will update my old Mac mini 2010 with Mac mini M2 or iMac M2 Instead of repair the old one... Emulated Stockfish 13 Windows 10 x64 with 4 CPUs computes only 3.000 Knps, on Mac mini M1 ARM64 6 Millions n / second ! (average)

[jshriver]

Since Apple Silicon M1 has 16-core Neuronal Engine, could be possible to use it to speed up engines like Lc0?

https://www.apple.com/bh/mac/m1/

I've wondered that myself. If its exposed via opencl it might be possible. Out of my wheelhouse though.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

Since Apple Silicon M1 has 16-core Neuronal Engine, could be possible to use it to speed up engines like Lc0?

https://www.apple.com/bh/mac/m1/

I've wondered that myself. If its exposed via opencl it might be possible. Out of my wheelhouse though.

lc0 can use the GPU via OpenCL. A 256x20 runs at about 800 nps.

The Neural Engine is not exposed via OpenCL, and requires specific code and a converted network. I haven't seen anything easy enough to bother testing it so far, and support in PyTorch is lacking for the moment.

[AlexChess]

Thank you for the clear explanation

[AlexChess]

Just a non technical observation from my own personal experience. If you had to give a senior , someone over 6o, or someone 8 years old and younger, their first computer , you would be far better served ( as they will be too) giving them a macOS machine as opposed to any other computer, period and end of story.

Hi MikeB!
For next releases of Black Diamond, BlueFish, Harmon, Honey and Oki-Maguro (I love them all, especially Beth Harmon ) if possible, could you let an easy compilation for beginners on Mac with Homebrew, as done by Stockfish and Lc0?

https://brew.sh/index_it

My Beth Harmon logo for GUIs https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkW3Hj0Gl_ewzxvw9Oo ... E?e=M9Wn7d


Thank you!!
AlexChess

[cpeters]

Hello Alex!

Is xboard compatible with Linux ARM64?

Everything in the arm64-Ubuntu-repositories is of course compatible - if it's in there, it should work. You could also check out 'chessx' - not as mighty/customiziable as scid/xboard but because of that maybe more accessible/userfriendly not just at first glance...

I wouldn't know about Arena on Linux, as I do not run closed-sourced binaries/firmware (evil nvidiablob the exception...) on this platform as a principle.


greetings

[AlexChess]

Hello Alex!

Is xboard compatible with Linux ARM64?

Everything in the arm64-Ubuntu-repositories is of course compatible - if it's in there, it should work. You could also check out 'chessx' - not as mighty/customiziable as scid/xboard but because of that maybe more accessible/userfriendly not just at first glance...

I wouldn't know about Arena on Linux, as I do not run closed-sourced binaries/firmware (evil nvidiablob the exception...) on this platform as a principle.

Thank you, I'll try ChessX also on Ubuntu. I like the Acepoint_de's porting to macOS M1

greetings

[AlexChess]

Just a non technical observation from my own personal experience. If you had to give a senior , someone over 6o, or someone 8 years old and younger, their first computer , you would be far better served ( as they will be too) giving them a macOS machine as opposed to any other computer, period and end of story.

Hi MikeB!

Sorry If I often ask to you, but your are the "master" here I'm trying to learn how to compile chess engines for myself on Mac M1.

Could you help Acepoint_de to modify the makefile to compile also Harmon and Bluefish? I have them on Windows 10 but they are 20 times slower on this emulated system.

@Acepoint_de I have Xcode 12.2 & Cygnus, if you write a little tutorial I could collaborate with you to compile all the best GPL 3.0 engines (and keep them updated to the last patches) for M1.

Thank you!
AlexChess

[Ckappe]

Thanks for the banchmark page https://acepoint.de/engine-benchmarks-on-apples-m1/

But why do you test single thread only for CPU-engines and 2-threads only for GPU??
Could you post the actuall all cores benchmarks as well?

[AlexChess]

Here you find my preliminary Blitz with acepoint's compiled M1 engines using 4 CPU and 4 Threads:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkW3Hj0Gl_ewzxxoaD7 ... e?e=mZUTDV