Given that AlphaZero will presumably never be publicly available, I think you might be interested in TCEC which has fair fights between Stockfish and LeelaChessZero (which Stockfish has won recently).
> I think you might be interested in TCEC which has fair fights between Stockfish and LeelaChessZero
This is pretty questionable in my judgment, actually. TCEC's GPU hardware is 4x Nvidia V100 data center class GPUs, with a pretty powerful processor to boot. A quick search suggests that ONE of these will run you close to $10k, so we're talking about an all-in system worth mid five figures.
Meanwhile, the CPU hardware is pretty dated at this point. They have 4x Intel E5-4669V4, which is from early 2016. It's not easy to find this processor for sale any more (because, again, it's old), but prices seem to run in the $750 - $1500 range if you look on places like Ebay. Meanwhile even on Ebay a V100 is likely to run you $7K+.
I don't know that it's possible to compare "performance" between GPUs and CPUs in a one to one way, but looking at cost, it seems pretty clear that you'd have to spend a lot more to get a system that allows Leela to play at the kind of level you see on TCEC.
Looking at power consumption tells a similar story. Nvidia's data sheet for the V100 shows a maximum power consumption of 250 watts per GPU, so 1000W when running at maximum load (as a chess engine is presumably likely to do). Meanwhile, Intel places the TDP of the E5-4669v4 CPU at 135 watts. Even assuming they're undershooting that by a bit, we're probably talking 600 watts for that system ... on a rather old CPU model.
I'd say it's not a fair comparison. I'm not mad about it, because at the end of the day computer chess tournaments are for entertainment. It's much better if the best neural net programs are competitive with more traditional chess engines, even if by "objective" standards they are weaker.
zucker42|4 years ago
bscphil|4 years ago
This is pretty questionable in my judgment, actually. TCEC's GPU hardware is 4x Nvidia V100 data center class GPUs, with a pretty powerful processor to boot. A quick search suggests that ONE of these will run you close to $10k, so we're talking about an all-in system worth mid five figures.
Meanwhile, the CPU hardware is pretty dated at this point. They have 4x Intel E5-4669V4, which is from early 2016. It's not easy to find this processor for sale any more (because, again, it's old), but prices seem to run in the $750 - $1500 range if you look on places like Ebay. Meanwhile even on Ebay a V100 is likely to run you $7K+.
I don't know that it's possible to compare "performance" between GPUs and CPUs in a one to one way, but looking at cost, it seems pretty clear that you'd have to spend a lot more to get a system that allows Leela to play at the kind of level you see on TCEC.
Looking at power consumption tells a similar story. Nvidia's data sheet for the V100 shows a maximum power consumption of 250 watts per GPU, so 1000W when running at maximum load (as a chess engine is presumably likely to do). Meanwhile, Intel places the TDP of the E5-4669v4 CPU at 135 watts. Even assuming they're undershooting that by a bit, we're probably talking 600 watts for that system ... on a rather old CPU model.
I'd say it's not a fair comparison. I'm not mad about it, because at the end of the day computer chess tournaments are for entertainment. It's much better if the best neural net programs are competitive with more traditional chess engines, even if by "objective" standards they are weaker.