Today, after a month of extensive testing and stockpiling of new servers, we’ve rolled out our 3rd major NCM CPU hardware upgrade. We’ve replaced our old dual Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 dedicated servers with new AMD Ryzen 5950X dedicated servers.
Here’s a quick hardware comparison:
| 2x E5-2680-v2 | Ryzen 5950X | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU Benchmark | 20678 | 46208 |
| Single Thread Rating | 1763 | 3501 |
| Launch Date | Q3 2013 | Q4 2020 |
| CPU Cores | 20 | 16 |
| Supports BMI2? | no | yes |
The new 5950X servers have fewer but much faster CPU cores than the old 2x E5-2680-v2 servers. Also, the 5950X, being a newer processor, supports the BMI2 instruction set, which gives Stockfish and many other engines a significant performance boost.
NCM’s live engine testing evaluated the upgrade by having Stockfish 14.1 on the old hardware play itself on the new hardware at various seconds per move. Here is the summary of the results:
| Time | 2x E5-2680-v2 W/L/D | Ryzen 5950x W/L/D |
|---|---|---|
| 250ms/move | 3/18/79 | 18/3/79 |
| 1s/move | 2/5/93 | 5/2/93 |
| 5s/move | 0/2/98 | 2/0/98 |
| 10s/move | 1/2/97 | 2/1/97 |
| 20s/move | 2/5/93 | 5/2/93 |
| 30s/move | 2/2/96 | 2/2/96 |
We also collected statistics during these tests about knps and depth.
Average knps per server and movetime:
| hardware | 250ms | 1s | 5s | 10s | 20s | 30s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VPS | 593 | 661 | 675 | 631 | 635 | 631 |
| 2x E5-2680-v2 | 16000 | 16370 | 16858 | 16380 | 17840 | 17235 |
| 5950X | 26205 | 26079 | 25907 | 25426 | 27276 | 26339 |
Average depth per server and movetime:
| hardware | 250ms | 1s | 5s | 10s | 20s | 30s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VPS | 14.35 | 19.53 | 26.89 | 28.91 | 33.02 | 34.71 |
| 2x E5-2680-v2 | 19.85 | 26.73 | 36.02 | 39.40 | 44.27 | 46.35 |
| 5950X | 22.82 | 29.43 | 38.80 | 42.28 | 47.68 | 49.23 |
We’re updating the Android and iPhone apps soon. Currently the apps refer to the old hardware, but remote calculations for paid NCM Pro members are executed on the new hardware. You can verify this by calculating from the starting position: you should get approximately 21000knps, as opposed to approximately 12000knps on the old hardware.
