Intel's 160-threaded machine (8 CPUS x 10 cores x 2 threads)

[64_bit_checkers_engine]

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Xeon-w ... or=RSS-181

Thursday an Intel spokesperson said that its upcoming 10-core "Westmere-EX" Xeon processor (pdf) will launch during the first half of 2011. The chip follows Intel's 2010 release of the Nehalem-EX CPU, currently the fastest Intel server processor on the market sporting up to eight cores.

The new Xeons will bring additional security features to the table including Advanced Encryption Standard-New Instructions (AES-NI) for faster encryption and decryption of data. The processor itself will be manufactured using 32nm processing technology whereas the current Nehalem-EX was made using the 45nm process.

The Intel spokesperson added that Westmere-EX will be targeted at high-end servers--those with up to eight sockets--in data centers maintaining large databases and other applications. Each physical core will run up to two threads, providing servers with the ability to run up to 160 threads simultaneously (8 processors @ 20 threads each).

In addition to the improved design, the new Xeon will be socket-compatible with existing Nehalem-EX chips, making it easy for customers to upgrade server processors. Two-socket systems running on Westmere-EX chips will also support up to 2 TB of memory.

[BertTuyt]

I'm afraid it exceeds my budget, but anyway....
The positive news, a 8P DB in less then 1 week
And the negative.....
I'm not sure if our parallel search (in my case YBWC) scales well towards these numbers (80 - 160 threads).

Bert

[64_bit_checkers_engine]

I'm afraid it exceeds my budget, but anyway....
The positive news, a 8P DB in less then 1 week

Hi Bert,

Wow, that is something! Ed tells me that the 8p in I. Draughts is twice the size of the 10p in regular 8x8 checkers. That must have taken a long time to compute!

And the negative.....
I'm not sure if our parallel search (in my case YBWC) scales well towards these numbers (80 - 160 threads).

I tested Kingsrow International on a system with 4 cores and 8 hyperthreads, a 3.9 GHz i7-870 that I built. It performs as well as an i7-980x @ its stock speed of 3.4 GHz on a core-by-core comparison.

K.R.I. was able to search 21 million nodes/second using 7 threads (I was using thread #8 for something) so gains are appreciable if the parallelism is working well.

[BertTuyt]

I tested Kingsrow International on a system with 4 cores and 8 hyperthreads, a 3.9 GHz i7-870 that I built. It performs as well as an i7-980x @ its stock speed of 3.4 GHz on a core-by-core comparison.

K.R.I. was able to search 21 million nodes/second using 7 threads (I was using thread #8 for something) so gains are appreciable if the parallelism is working well.

I guess that the parallel search scales in terms of nodes/second.
But im not sure if the time to depth, compared with a non-parallel program, scales in the same way.
Normally you will encounter saturation when increasing the number of threads...

Bert

[64_bit_checkers_engine]

I guess that the parallel search scales in terms of nodes/second.
But im not sure if the time to depth, compared with a non-parallel program, scales in the same way. Normally you will encounter saturation when increasing the number of threads...

Bert

Yes Bert, when I ran K.R.I. with 8 threads, it was not noticeably faster than with 7 threads.

I remember Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer saying that his experiments with 8x8 checkers showed a performance gain = the square root of the number of processors. So, 4 processors = 2x as fast, 16 processors = 4x as fast, etc.

Here is a new AMD "Interlagos" video. It has 16 cores per CPU, and they put 2 CPUs on this board at the end for 32 cores. It will probably be much cheaper than the 160-threaded Intel!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v07kzah ... r_embedded