Winboard Forum

Hello...

I was wondering what is the best microprocessor for test and use the chess engines..

amd? intel? which models??

pimidrez

Intel Core i7 has the best absolute prformance. But if you are looking or best performance per dollar, or best performance per Watt, you might end up with another choice, as macines with Core i7 tend to be still quite expensive.

Most people tend to discard the cost of electricity. But if you are testing 24/7, replacing two old PCs with a single new one might easily earn you back th purchase price of the new one in 1-2 years in saved electricity.

Using 4 low-end laptops of $300 might actually get you more games of equal quality at much lower cost than a single quad-core machine would, as laptops use very little power.

Will laptops stand running 7/24/365 at full power on both cores? This is certainly not the typical use for a laptop, so up to now I dared not do that. Have you tried?

I pretty much run my laptop most of the time. (It has only a single core, though.) It does not seem to cause any problems. You could even use a laptop without any moving parts (i.e. solid-state disk). I would not expect any wear at all there.

H.G.Muller wrote:Using 4 low-end laptops of $300 might actually get you more games of equal quality at much lower cost than a single quad-core machine would, as laptops use very little power.

I would seriously doubt that. While laptops generally have low power components, I doubt their power supplies are as efficient as decent desktop ones. The cooling systems on laptops generally aren't designed for 24/7 use either. Really, breaking it down, each laptop consumes the power for motherboard, cpu, ram, harddrive, a display, etc, all for one or two cores.

OTOH, if you build custom quadcores, you can make them very low power and very low cost. One 45nm quad-core chip will use much less power than 2 dual-core chips (assuming the laptops are dual core, you can't buy single core Core 2 cpus anyways). In addition, you can only use the minimum needed to run: mobo, cpu, ram, and instead of a hard drive, a usb stick. No graphics card either. All of this, including the case, is just a bit over $300.

In addition, if you use quad cores, they are much more efficient when you link them together to build a distributed search.