Houdini 2.0 Pro
We finished up our tour of applications with quite a particular choice, namely artificial intelligence algorithms designed for chess. We started with Houdini Pro 2, via the Arena 3 interface. Version 1.5 dominated the top of the chess engine classifications and Version 2 seems destined to do the same. We left the engine running until the 24th move at the beginning of a game and noted the speed in kilo nodes per second.
Houdini doesn’t really do all that well with Sandy Bridge architecture and there’s a slight dip in performance (-0.7%) in comparison to the Core i7-990X, a score which is fortunately an exception. All six cores are however fully used and there’s a 44.3% gain on the 2600K.
Fritz Chess Benchmark 4.3
We then moved on to Fritz Chess Benchmarking from Chess Base. Once again the results are given in kilo nodes per second.
This chess engine doesn’t benefit greatly from the Sandy Bridge architecture either but here we did record a small gain of 2.4%. In comparison to the 2600K, performance was up by 47%.
