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Writer's pictureDarius

Stockfish 2023-02-23, another gift for Mac users.

How about +18% in speed compared to Stockfish 15.1 ?

To show exactly what this increase in speed is, I'll put in a number: + 345 099 nodes/second !


Who exactly will benefit from this? Users of Macs with Apple Silicon processor - that is, the latest fastest Macs with M1, M1 Pro, M2, etc. processors.

Here is what Mr. Sebastian Buchwald wrote for the 2023-02-23 issue of Stockfish:

"

Add support for ARM dot product instructions


The sdot instruction computes (and accumulates) a signed dot product,

which is quite handy for Stockfish's NNUE code. The instruction is

optional for Armv8.2 and Armv8.3, and mandatory for Armv8.4 and above.


The commit adds a new 'arm-dotprod' architecture with enabled dot

product support. It also enables dot product support for the existing

'apple-silicon' architecture, which is at least Armv8.5.


The following local speed test was performed on an Apple M1 with

ARCH=apple-silicon. I had to remove CPU pinning from the benchmark

script. However, the results were still consistent: Checking both

binaries against themselves reported a speedup of +0.0000 and +0.0005,

respectively.


```

Result of 100 runs

==================

base (...ish.037ef3e1) = 1917997 +/- 7152

test (...fish.dotprod) = 2159682 +/- 9066

diff = +241684 +/- 2923


speedup = +0.1260

P(speedup > 0) = 1.0000


CPU: 10 x arm

Hyperthreading: off

"

Source: Abrok



I did a few tests (Stockfish bench) and tabulated the resulting data:

The result leaves no doubt. The development version of Stockfish 20220223 is 18% faster than the official Stockfish 15.1 version.


It has not yet been a year since the release of the 15 st version of this chess engine, and thanks to the work of the developers, Stockfish 20230223 is stronger by 57 Elo. At this - the highest - level, such an increase in strength should be considered a significant achievement.


Thank you very much to the Stockfish Team for the fruitful work and ever-improving support of the latest computers with Apple Silicon family processors.




Feel free to visit the download area



Source code – by Stockfish Devs


Android – Compiled by Archimedes


Linux arm64 & x64 – Compiled by Darius


Mac Apple Silicon & Intel – Compiled by Darius


Windows x32 & x64 – Compiled by Darius




 

In the Files area you will find free chess engines for download.

 

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