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.
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