M ANSARI wrote:You could probably get a dual Xeon 9775 and run it on a Skulltrail pretty cheap on ebay. Most people I know that have that setup can easily run 8 cores at 4 Ghz. On the other hand a highly overclocked i920 or its Xeon equivalent can also reach 4 Ghz or more on water and will give the 8 core system a run for its money. While not as strong as the 8 core with 4 cores, maybe with 6 cores it will be. I would wait for the 6 core i920 or xeon equivalent and push those 6 cores to the max. I think a non overclocked Nehalem 8 core will have trouble keeping up and since an overclockable platform for the dual socket Nehalem doesn't look like it will happen, the highest performing chess hardware might just be a overclocked 6 core i series setup.
Thanks Majd....
Any hope for a double socket motherboards for these 6 cores babies or it's just too early to know that
Dr.D
_No one can hit as hard as life.But it ain’t about how hard you can hit.It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.How much you can take and keep moving forward….
For sure there will be 6 core dual socket and most likely also an 8 core. The cores are basically the same with the Xeon maybe having a few more pins if any. The Xeon equivalent of the i920 works in any i series motherboard. I decided to buy one instead of buying an i920 because the xeon chips are usually better binned. I can push it to 4.2 Ghz with simple air cooling while on an early i920 I was only able to get around 3.2 Ghz. The cost of the xeon chip is only about $20 more but is the best $20 you will ever spend.
The problem with dual socket motherboards is that they are not overclockable. I think the fastest Nehalem dual socket is 8 cores at 3.33 Ghz. If you have a Vapochill then you can probably run these new 6 core processors at around 5 Ghz ... now if you factor in the fact that as you go up in cores the scaling efficiency decreases ... then those 6 cores at 5 Ghz are probably going to outperform the more expensive top of the line dual socket Nehalem setup.
Thanks, Majd. My mind is getting clearer now: No need to wait for the quad.
I'll buy promptly a quad for hundreds of engines that are in the waiting queue.
Lars,
this is an argument I cannot agree. e.g. I bet that Naum on quad is qual or better than naum on octa....
See Stockfish also.... sure no plus when on 8 cores...KNs is not all
for what do you need a machine with 8 real cpu cores?
Only a few engines get a measureable plus from 4 upto 8 cpus.
I did many longtime tests in the past.
Zappa, DeepFritz 11 showed an improovment on 8 cores. The rest of top ten was average.
Regards, clemens
For testing, an octa is exactly twice as better than a quad
With an octa, you can test engines at full potential (using four cores) with pondering "on"
Miguel
Hello Miguel
I did this kind of engine games many times. Playing on octa, 2 engines with 4 cpus, ponderON.
Sometimes I got verry strange results, even after a high number of games. So I lost my trust in that.
I would recommend to play two quad machines vs each other. Connected with e.g. NullModemCable on com port using auto232 player. Remote engine via network also a good way.
And quads are much cheaper( and silent) that an octa machine.
The AMD opteron 2000 server CPU is available at really good prices at the moment.
I just recently purchased 2 new Opteron 2380 (4x2.5GHz) for less than €100 and together with a SuperMicro H8DAi-2 motherboard (€300) and 32GB RAM (€400) I got a very fast machine for very little money.
You could also get the same Skulltrail system I mentioned and add 2 Xeon 2.66 Ghz (very cheap) and run them at 3.2 Ghz. It would outperform the Opteron you mentioned by quite a bit, although 32 GB of memory would cost quite a penny since it would registered dimms. However for chess you really don't need more than 8 GB.
I'm not sure, the Opterons in my opinion run quite a bit faster than the Xeon at the same clock frequency.
It also has a very good built-in memory manager and don't rely on motherboard chipset for memory access.
Just as an example, my office machine (a very old dual opteron 290) that runs 400Mhz memory has about 15% faster memory access and throughput than my gaming machine (Athlon 4x 9650) that runs 800Mhz ddr2 memory. (In fact it's only 5% down in CPU-power too.)
ECC REG memory was really expensive when we were dealing with DDR (pc3200) but the price difference for DDR2 (pc6400) is quite negligable, the 32GB memory in my 2x2380 is DDR2 PC6400R (reg ecc) and cost me €400.
The effect when running a chess engine, which relies heavily on memory access, is very noticable.
