Houdini 1.03 is available

[yanquis1972]

are the kn/s way up here? i'm getting like 2M nps on 1 cpu.

[halestorm]

Give the guy a break. He just released on a date he said he would. "What's next?" Wow.

Can someone tell me please which CPU_x is used for i7 920? It's 4 physical cores but 8 logical cores. So do I use 4 or 8 Houdini for my 64-bit Win7?

[Gerold]

Thanks Robert.
Much appreciated.

Best,
Gerold.

[Robert Houdart]

Hi, Robert! What are your next plans about Houdini?
Can we wait for Tbs support in the next releases of your excellent engine?
To beat Rybka 4 steadily we need TBs, I think Gaviota TBs will be good enough to it!

The idea is first to create a Linux executable for Houdini 1.03, and only then I'll start planning the next release.

Robert

[Robert Houdart]

Give the guy a break. He just released on a date he said he would. "What's next?" Wow.

Can someone tell me please which CPU_x is used for i7 920? It's 4 physical cores but 8 logical cores. So do I use 4 or 8 Houdini for my 64-bit Win7?

The 4_CPU version will probably be best. You'll probably get a slightly higher node count with the 8_CPU version, but that will not necessarily translate into strength: 8 threads create more overhead and memory contention than 4 threads.

Robert

[giorgio]

Can someone tell me please which CPU_x is used for i7 920? It's 4 physical cores but 8 logical cores. So do I use 4 or 8 Houdini for my 64-bit Win7?

Defenitely 4 cores. Hyper threading is not useful with chess engines.
HT aids if you want to do something else while the chess engine is analyzing your position, so you have an additional (virtual) core for other tasks and the task switching is at CPU level (faster than SO level), but anyway the calculation power of the additional core is subtracted from the real cores.
So, if you want to run your engine at the max speed, it's better to set it at the number of the real cores, in order to avoid any type of task switching and all overhead it implies.

[John Doe]

Houdini 1.03 unfortunately freezes in the infinite analysis mode in my Fritz 12 and ChessBase 10.
The only way to unlock engine is kill it in the task manager.

[Robert Houdart]

Defenitely 4 cores. Hyper threading is not useful with chess engines.
HT aids if you want to do something else while the chess engine is analyzing your position, so you have an additional (virtual) core for other tasks and the task switching is at CPU level (faster than SO level), but anyway the calculation power of the additional core is subtracted from the real cores.
So, if you want to run your engine at the max speed, it's better to set it at the number of the real cores, in order to avoid any type of task switching and all overhead it implies.

I agree.
By the way, people with 4 or 8 cores should experiment with the Split_Depth UCI parameter to achieve the best performance on their hardware. The default value is 10 (tuned on my Core i5-750 @2.66 GHz), but on some systems it may be advantageous to increase this to 12 or 13.

Robert

[aiorla]

By the way, people with 4 or 8 cores should experiment with the Split_Depth UCI parameter to achieve the best performance on their hardware. The default value is 10 (tuned on my Core i5-750 @2.66 GHz), but on some systems it may be advantageous to increase this to 12 or 13.

Robert

Great, we have the same hardware, less preocupations

[robbolito]

Hi Robert,
thanks for the new version.
I have started 2 separate matches on 2 different computers.So far I have already had 3 exceptions caused by Houdini.2 exceptions were on AMD 6 cores and one on Q9550.
Previous version was very stable but this new one for some reason is having problems.
Did anybody else so far had the similar problem with this new version.
robbolito