Which cpu would be best at calculating moves for a chess engine?
Chess is not a brute-force problem these days. Deep Blue had custom chess hardware, but that was a decade ago. The deciding factor is how intelligent your algorithms are. In the most recent human-vs-computer tournament, Deep Fritz ran on two dual-core Intel CPUs. The Rybka program may be even better. It’s written in C++, available free for download, and will run on any hardware you put it to. The native optimizer will make it as efficient as possible on that hardware, and so which hardware will run it fastest depends more on the state of the optimizer at any point than the cpu itself. These days, the real work is being done on multi-processor systems: what’s the most efficient way to distribute the problems across as many computers as possible. The limiting factor isn’t CPU speed or architecture, but bandwidth and latency, and how effectively you can use them. If you want to play chess against a comp
