Gerade auf talkchess gelesen: Don Daley vom Komodoteam will die Testhardware aufrüsten und Norman Schmidt sagt, daß ein gewisser Ahmed Mansoor wohl große Hardwareressourcen für Houdini zur Verfügung stellt und auch schon gestellt hat. Ob das stimmt, weiß ich allerdings nicht. Auf jeden Fall bekommt die kommerzielle Konkurrenz an der Weltspitze langsam kalte Füße, aufgrund des extrem schnellen Fortschritts von Stockfish und dem zugrunde liegenden offenen Testframework. Im Moment laufen dort übrigens gerade 188 Cores und insgesamt wurden schon fast 27.5 Millionen Partien dort gespielt. Unfaßbar!
Hier mal das Originalposting (1.Teil von Don Daley, 2.Teil von Norman Schmidt):

We are looking to possibly purchase more hardware for out testing. WE already have a 16 core Intel machine but are considering something additional, something with more horsepower.

I have not started researching it, but I was looking for opinions. If we go beyond 16 cores AMD would be a consideration - but the last time we checked it did not seem like a good trade-off - you get a lot more cores but with substantially less performances per core.

By far our primary consideration is being able to run our automated tester and get as many games as possible at a given performance level. 32 AMD cores are better than 16 if the performance of each core is more than half (at chess) but we don't really know that or the price differences.

Does anyone have information about this?

The power utilization is not a huge factor as energy is cheap here - but it's a minor consideration.

Hi Don-
I think you really need to go 'big' here...(and I mean 'big'!)
the processing power (i.e. testing capacity) available to the Stockfish distributed testing framework has the potential to be huge

Houdini's 'benefactor' (business partner?) Ahmed Mansoor has access to thousands of cores, and his resources and commitment to Houdart shouldn't be underestimated
(he directly supported the development of Houdini 3, and is largely responsible for Houdini's tremendous improvement)

Apparently, he is prepared to offer Robert whatever resources are needed in or order for Houdini to compete with Stockfish.