Apple M1 Ultra - is this enough for chess?

[Sopel]

You can get the same and more from AVX512 galois field instructions

Pls dont ever quote me ever again. You half knowledge is just too annoying.
Have you looked at the throughput and latency? Not to mention that AVX512 is DOA and Intel is suspected to drop it soon... Enabling AVX512 often makes every other process on the system run slower.

If you are using this in production code - measure what you did to everyone around you.
If anyone reads this: Sopel is a confirmed forum troll who is just very annoying to every thread he writes to.


Back to topic:
M1 looks interesting - will wait for INDEPENDENT reviews.

Yes, I did. VGF2P8AFFINEQB has 0.5 rtp and latency of ~7. Enabling AVX512 doesn't throttle in itself; if you limit yourself to <512-bit wide instructions there is no throttling, and even if you don't it only throttles on a subset of them.

[WuShock]

Does the Neural Engine do anything for chess ?

The 32-core Neural Engine in M1 Ultra runs up to 22 trillion operations per second, speeding through the most challenging machine learning tasks.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/03/ ... -computer/

[Sopel]

Does the Neural Engine do anything for chess ?

The 32-core Neural Engine in M1 Ultra runs up to 22 trillion operations per second, speeding through the most challenging machine learning tasks.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/03/ ... -computer/

There's no way to use it aside from a very limited high-level library specific for apple (Core ML) so it's useless for NNUE. Lc0 could maybe use it because it uses a more typical NN but it's not clear if even that would be possible.

[Magnum]

Koivisto has support for ARM (M1) CPUs. I tested the performance compared to my 3950x and the speed is very similar.

Very similar to 3950x sounds fine.

[Magnum]

For stockfish 14.1 pure nnue we should expect about 30MNps, extrapolating from https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/st ... 0.2326552/ and https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/co ... e=13330272. Comparing to http://ipmanchess.yolasite.com/amd--int ... ckfish.php it should place around AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/ Intel Core i5 12600K. Respectable, but nothing special.

M2 chips will be release in the second half of 2022.
M2 Ultra will have +4 performance cores:
16 + 4 = 20 performance cores
+4 high efficiency cores = 24 CPU cores.
On top of that the M2 Ultra cores will be 20% faster.
For Stockfish 14.1 pure nnue we should expect 44MNps.

[Werewolf]

For stockfish 14.1 pure nnue we should expect about 30MNps, extrapolating from https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/st ... 0.2326552/ and https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/co ... e=13330272. Comparing to http://ipmanchess.yolasite.com/amd--int ... ckfish.php it should place around AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/ Intel Core i5 12600K. Respectable, but nothing special.

M2 chips will be release in the second half of 2022.
M2 Ultra will have +4 performance cores:
16 + 4 = 20 performance cores
+4 high efficiency cores = 24 CPU cores.
On top of that the M2 Ultra cores will be 20% faster.
For Stockfish 14.1 pure nnue we should expect 44MNps.

About half a Threadripper then

[Sopel]

For stockfish 14.1 pure nnue we should expect about 30MNps, extrapolating from https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/st ... 0.2326552/ and https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/co ... e=13330272. Comparing to http://ipmanchess.yolasite.com/amd--int ... ckfish.php it should place around AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/ Intel Core i5 12600K. Respectable, but nothing special.

M2 chips will be release in the second half of 2022.
M2 Ultra will have +4 performance cores:
16 + 4 = 20 performance cores
+4 high efficiency cores = 24 CPU cores.
On top of that the M2 Ultra cores will be 20% faster.
For Stockfish 14.1 pure nnue we should expect 44MNps.

That's a lot of numbers to add up without any source. Either way, it's not like AMD/Intel is sleeping

[Ras]

About half a Threadripper then

Quite a Big Mac.

[Modern Times]

Is it "enough" for chess, the answer has to be yes unless you have some sort of extreme requirements. Whether or not you want to pay the Apple premium, be tied into the Apple eco-system, and use Apple's OS is another question altogether.

[mar]

the efficiency cores on M1 run at least 2x slower than performance cores (depending on what you do), I imagine this could add a ton of noise when playing multiple games in parallel.