Intel’s Woodcrest processor outperformed AMD’s Opteron* at the 14th World Computer Chess Championship held in Turin, Italy, May 24-June 1. In a machine-against-machine, program-against-program contest, a program named Deep Junior running on a Woodcrest dual-processor system won the championship by literally checkmating other renowned chess programs running on AMD processors.
The Deep Junior program had been a four-time world computer chess champion and was planning to run on a 4-way Opteron-based system. On the AMD platform, it could compute approximately 6 million nodes per second (MNPS). Moving to the 4-way Woodcrest system, Deep Junior achieved 8.2 MNPS. After recompiling with the Intel® Compiler, it reached 8.4 MNPS. Applying the Intel Compiler’s profile-guided optimizations, the Woodcrest system achieved 9 MNPS, a 50-percent improvement over the AMD Opteron system’s baseline.
For this year’s competition, Pablo Calabrese, Intel Software and Solutions Group engineer, worked with the program’s authors, two Israeli software developers named Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky. Together they optimized Deep Junior’s performance the Intel platform, starting less than two weeks before the competition date. Calabrese also provided ongoing support and fine-tuning as needed throughout the competition.
The world championship in computerized chess pits 18 computer programs from various countries against each other—human chess players do not compete. Deep Junior’s main challengers this year were Shredder, a German program running on a 4x2, 2.6-GHz AMD system, and last year’s winner, Zappa, an American entry running on a 512-processor supercomputer calculating 100 million nodes per second.
The Deep Junior program had been a four-time world computer chess champion and was planning to run on a 4-way Opteron-based system. On the AMD platform, it could compute approximately 6 million nodes per second (MNPS). Moving to the 4-way Woodcrest system, Deep Junior achieved 8.2 MNPS. After recompiling with the Intel® Compiler, it reached 8.4 MNPS. Applying the Intel Compiler’s profile-guided optimizations, the Woodcrest system achieved 9 MNPS, a 50-percent improvement over the AMD Opteron system’s baseline.
For this year’s competition, Pablo Calabrese, Intel Software and Solutions Group engineer, worked with the program’s authors, two Israeli software developers named Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky. Together they optimized Deep Junior’s performance the Intel platform, starting less than two weeks before the competition date. Calabrese also provided ongoing support and fine-tuning as needed throughout the competition.
The world championship in computerized chess pits 18 computer programs from various countries against each other—human chess players do not compete. Deep Junior’s main challengers this year were Shredder, a German program running on a 4x2, 2.6-GHz AMD system, and last year’s winner, Zappa, an American entry running on a 512-processor supercomputer calculating 100 million nodes per second.
