Gui that support UCI engines (like stockfish) on mac

[Werewolf]

I was thinking about buying a m2 MacBook pro this year.
I definitely would like to run stockfish for analysis occasionally and some engine vs engine matches.

What are my best options (to use m2 at full potential)?

Fritz ever decide to support Macbook pro (M chip series)?

I can tell you that the M1 MAX is a big fun.
BanksiaGUI is the best.
Of course Stockfish can be used.
LC0 can be used too
You can do the infinite analysis or the much better ECA.
Engine vs engine matches, tournaments are great with lots of informations.
To run testsuites is also possible.
It's very simple to download all 3 to 7 syzygy endgame tablebases.
I've tested "Battle vs Chess", the newest Fritz GUI, newest ChessBase GUI, newest ChessOK Aquarium GUI and other GUIs too and all works fine.
Parallels Desktop with Windows 11 for ARM is great.
CrossOver is great too.
Rosetta 2 is amazing.
Newest macOS Ventura
Other Apple apps but not macOS apps works fine too.
Linux works too.

If you're running Windows in Parallels, which is the fastest Stockfish build for Apple silicon? AVX2? Haswell?

[Werewolf]

He can use Homebrew or much better compile himself - much faster Stockfish.

Compile himself means:
1. Click on Stockfish Code and download https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish

When you click here, which bit exactly do you work with? I've downloaded Stockfish-master, but where do I go from there?

[Werewolf]

He can use Homebrew or much better compile himself - much faster Stockfish.

Compile himself means:
1. Click on Stockfish Code and download https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish

When you click here, which bit exactly do you work with? I've downloaded Stockfish-master, but where do I go from there?

bumpity bump. Why is it mac users are so vocal except for when they're really needed?

[purechess]

Hiarcs Explorer is the best on Mac. Engines can be used to analyze games or you can play against engines.

Scid vs PC 64bit version might be useful too

[Werewolf]

Probably Banksia is the best choice (free). Or perhaps look at Hiarcs Chess Explorer if their Mac version runs nicely on M2.

So with Hiarcs I can download stockfish UCI from website and install it on macbook (Intel version)?

Yes, You can download yourself Stockifish from the official site and use it in Hiarcs Chess Explorer or Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro without any problems.

Really? He's buying an M2 Mac, doesn't he need to compile it himself with Homebrew?

He can use Homebrew or much better compile himself - much faster Stockfish.

Compile himself means:
1. Click on Stockfish Code and download https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish

2.Open Finder, click on downloads and push it from downloads to your user name (the house image).

3. Open Terminal and copy and paste:
cd /Users/my/Stockfish-master/src
(my is your user name)
click enter

then

make -j profile-build COMP=clang ARCH=apple-silicon
click enter

then

./stockfish compiler
click enter

then

make strip
click enter

4. Push Stockfish into BanksiaGUI.

I think he can do it within 10 seconds.

I got this working at last.

My findings on Apple's latest M2 processor is that the latest SF Dev (23rd Nov 2022) runs at 1M np/s on one thread and 4M np/s on 4 threads. That's about the same as a 3 year old Ryzen using the same number of threads.
Admittedly the M2 does it using a lot less power, but it will get creamed by the latest Intel / AMD CPUs which have more cores and, I think, better performance per core.

[wickedpotus]

I got this working at last.

My findings on Apple's latest M2 processor is that the latest SF Dev (23rd Nov 2022) runs at 1M np/s on one thread and 4M np/s on 4 threads. That's about the same as a 3 year old Ryzen using the same number of threads.
Admittedly the M2 does it using a lot less power, but it will get creamed by the latest Intel / AMD CPUs which have more cores and, I think, better performance per core.

It's kind of sad... Apple products are not that inexpensive and are hyped all over as "performance" laptops. But for everything chess-related they more or less suck compared to current-gen mobile CPUs from AMD and Intel. current Intel and AMD mid-range laptops run upward of 30.000.000 NPS on stockfish...RTX laptops will also run circles around mac on GPU-bound engines like Leela. Apart from this, there is support for eGPUS and lots of native chess software and engines available for AMD + Intel machines.

I can run an i7-12700H laptop in underwatted, power saving - silent mode - and it still beats a 6000usd Apple M1 Max laptop on stockfish performance

[Magnum]

I got this working at last.

My findings on Apple's latest M2 processor is that the latest SF Dev (23rd Nov 2022) runs at 1M np/s on one thread and 4M np/s on 4 threads. That's about the same as a 3 year old Ryzen using the same number of threads.
Admittedly the M2 does it using a lot less power, but it will get creamed by the latest Intel / AMD CPUs which have more cores and, I think, better performance per core.

It's kind of sad... Apple products are not that inexpensive and are hyped all over as "performance" laptops. But for everything chess-related they more or less suck compared to current-gen mobile CPUs from AMD and Intel. current Intel and AMD mid-range laptops run upward of 30.000.000 NPS on stockfish...RTX laptops will also run circles around mac on GPU-bound engines like Leela. Apart from this, there is support for eGPUS and lots of native chess software and engines available for AMD + Intel machines.

I can run an i7-12700H laptop in underwatted, power saving - silent mode - and it still beats a 6000usd Apple M1 Max laptop on stockfish performance

how poorly-coded Stockfish is for Apple Silicon
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m2 ... t-31778693

[Werewolf]

I got this working at last.

My findings on Apple's latest M2 processor is that the latest SF Dev (23rd Nov 2022) runs at 1M np/s on one thread and 4M np/s on 4 threads. That's about the same as a 3 year old Ryzen using the same number of threads.
Admittedly the M2 does it using a lot less power, but it will get creamed by the latest Intel / AMD CPUs which have more cores and, I think, better performance per core.

It's kind of sad... Apple products are not that inexpensive and are hyped all over as "performance" laptops. But for everything chess-related they more or less suck compared to current-gen mobile CPUs from AMD and Intel. current Intel and AMD mid-range laptops run upward of 30.000.000 NPS on stockfish...RTX laptops will also run circles around mac on GPU-bound engines like Leela. Apart from this, there is support for eGPUS and lots of native chess software and engines available for AMD + Intel machines.

I can run an i7-12700H laptop in underwatted, power saving - silent mode - and it still beats a 6000usd Apple M1 Max laptop on stockfish performance

how poorly-coded Stockfish is for Apple Silicon
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m2 ... t-31778693

But is that user part of the SF team? I'm sure I read a month ago from someone in the team it was well optimised for M1/M2. If it's actually not (yet) then that's good news going forward.

However, all my other benchmarks pretty much paint the same picture:
1) In EVERYTHING Apple silicon's performace per watt is excellent.
2) In Everything except 3) it's overall performance is only mediocre.
3) In software that benefits from things that are hard baked onto the silicon, such as being able to process ProRes, its performance is excellent.

On Final Cut I was amazed how fast it was using all the ProRes codecs. The 8 core M2 was literally twice as fast as an 8-core i9 Cascade Lake in an iMac (2019 release) which is a much bigger and more power hungry machine than my tiny MacBook Air.
But when I switched to H.264 the iMac was +15% faster.

[wickedpotus]

how poorly-coded Stockfish is for Apple Silicon
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m2 ... t-31778693

I do not agree in the slightest that the current best chess engines are "poorly coded"... Not sure why linking to screaming fanboys over at "macrumors.com" would add anything more than just the usual unobjective Apple-fanboyism-speak...

I am pretty sure these fanboys have little or no experience in optimizing code for high-end chess engines anyway.

The argument that Chess engines like SF, Leela, Dragon, Ethereal, etc are poorly coded for Apple Silicon makes about as much sense as claiming the reason a BMW X3 can't get the same lap time on Nurnburg ring as a 911 GT3, is purely a -driver- issue... Implies that the driver could compensate by not driving the X3 "poorly"...

And maybe you could argue Nissan Micra has a better "speed per gallon" than a 911 GT3 as well... But does the fuel consumption/economics really matter that much if you wanny get around a track as fast as possible?