Software vs hardware

[Jouni]

I have not seen this discussion for long time here. My feeling was, that software advances are lately much more than hardware. Vondele in SF discord confirms this:

SF2 was released 2010/2011, master now... in the same time the top CPUs roughly increased 10x in performance. (whatever the mark benchmark does: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html core i7-3960x - TR3995WX). So, a person with a top CPU in 2010 running sf2, would need to run roughly >4000x longer than a person with a top CPU in 2022 running SF14.1+ to have a similar strength analysis. In this 4000x difference, software advances roughly amount for a factor 400x, hardware advances 10x.

[smatovic]

My take is co-evolution, running NNUE on AVX2 is different than on SSE, training neural-networks on TFLOPS gpus different than on GFLOPS gpus...TPUs, TensorCores, RAM, big-data generation and storage, etc.

--
Srdja

[Magnum]

I have not seen this discussion for long time here. My feeling was, that software advances are lately much more than hardware. Vondele in SF discord confirms this:

SF2 was released 2010/2011, master now... in the same time the top CPUs roughly increased 10x in performance. (whatever the mark benchmark does: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html core i7-3960x - TR3995WX). So, a person with a top CPU in 2010 running sf2, would need to run roughly >4000x longer than a person with a top CPU in 2022 running SF14.1+ to have a similar strength analysis. In this 4000x difference, software advances roughly amount for a factor 400x, hardware advances 10x.

You can use a 10 years old cpu and you will probably lose only 1 elo.

[Werewolf]

I have not seen this discussion for long time here. My feeling was, that software advances are lately much more than hardware. Vondele in SF discord confirms this:

SF2 was released 2010/2011, master now... in the same time the top CPUs roughly increased 10x in performance. (whatever the mark benchmark does: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html core i7-3960x - TR3995WX). So, a person with a top CPU in 2010 running sf2, would need to run roughly >4000x longer than a person with a top CPU in 2022 running SF14.1+ to have a similar strength analysis. In this 4000x difference, software advances roughly amount for a factor 400x, hardware advances 10x.

Over the last 10 years the problem was exasperated by the "eternal Skylake" which resulted from little competition from AMD. Things seem back on track now though.

[Milos]

I have not seen this discussion for long time here. My feeling was, that software advances are lately much more than hardware. Vondele in SF discord confirms this:

SF2 was released 2010/2011, master now... in the same time the top CPUs roughly increased 10x in performance. (whatever the mark benchmark does: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html core i7-3960x - TR3995WX). So, a person with a top CPU in 2010 running sf2, would need to run roughly >4000x longer than a person with a top CPU in 2022 running SF14.1+ to have a similar strength analysis. In this 4000x difference, software advances roughly amount for a factor 400x, hardware advances 10x.

Over the last 10 years the problem was exasperated by the "eternal Skylake" which resulted from little competition from AMD. Things seem back on track now though.

The real reason is Intel's inability to develop a competitive manufacturing process. They were stuck at the same node for almost a decade. In 2013 they switched from 22nm to 14nm and were the first at 14nm. TSMC was still at 22nm at that time. 8 years later TSMC is at 4nm and Intel finally managed to get to 10nm.