Thinking of a new PC for photo editing? Read on ...

[MP Guy]

Intel’s Woodcrest processor outperformed AMD’s Opteron* at the 14th World Computer Chess Championship held in Turin, Italy, May 24-June 1. In a machine-against-machine, program-against-program contest, a program named Deep Junior running on a Woodcrest dual-processor system won the championship by literally checkmating other renowned chess programs running on AMD processors.

The Deep Junior program had been a four-time world computer chess champion and was planning to run on a 4-way Opteron-based system. On the AMD platform, it could compute approximately 6 million nodes per second (MNPS). Moving to the 4-way Woodcrest system, Deep Junior achieved 8.2 MNPS. After recompiling with the Intel® Compiler, it reached 8.4 MNPS. Applying the Intel Compiler’s profile-guided optimizations, the Woodcrest system achieved 9 MNPS, a 50-percent improvement over the AMD Opteron system’s baseline.

For this year’s competition, Pablo Calabrese, Intel Software and Solutions Group engineer, worked with the program’s authors, two Israeli software developers named Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky. Together they optimized Deep Junior’s performance the Intel platform, starting less than two weeks before the competition date. Calabrese also provided ongoing support and fine-tuning as needed throughout the competition.

The world championship in computerized chess pits 18 computer programs from various countries against each other—human chess players do not compete. Deep Junior’s main challengers this year were Shredder, a German program running on a 4x2, 2.6-GHz AMD system, and last year’s winner, Zappa, an American entry running on a 512-processor supercomputer calculating 100 million nodes per second.

[Fedzilla_Bob]

When there is reference to 4-way, does this mean that it is a "Quad" core? Or, is it 4 distinct processors?

[jlw]

I think the subject line should read, "Thinking of a new PC for chess playing?..."

[Joe Brugger]

Since you bring it up, what's a nice economical list of specs for a computer to do photo manipulation with Elements 4.0, handle e-mail and other Web duties, and run Patty Larkin music in the background?
What processor, what memory, what graphic/sound cards etc etc.
This box is eight years old and it's a little limited.

[Ash]

would be nice to have see wider applications. Of course chess requires so many cycles for each command, but bench-testing with image editing software isn't dependant only on processor.

[Stephan]

Originally Posted by jlw

I think the subject line should read, "Thinking of a new PC for chess playing?..."

Sounds more like it Anything you buy new nowadays stuffed with a load of extra RAM is pretty good for photoshop anyway. I'd spend more money on a decent couple of screens and a nice wacom tablet rather than an expensive processor and motherboard to go with it. Ooh and fast hard drives

[Stephan]

Originally Posted by Joe Brugger

Since you bring it up, what's a nice economical list of specs for a computer to do photo manipulation with Elements 4.0, handle e-mail and other Web duties, and run Patty Larkin music in the background?
What processor, what memory, what graphic/sound cards etc etc.
This box is eight years old and it's a little limited.

Do you want a windows pc or a mac ? Those new iBooks are nice (throw some extra ram at it just in case 1 Gb total should be fine unless you routinely work on pictures over 150 Mb or so)

[ClaremontPhoto]

The iMacs are Intel dual core now, the 20" is $1,700.

You may want extra memory but it's very very easy to add it yourself later. (And much less expensive than having Apple do the upgrade before it ships).

[Fedzilla_Bob]

Even 1 gig these days seems like barely enough. Both XP and OS X can consume their large-ish share of RAM. Try running Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and any microsoft app concurrently and you will be in virtual memory on your hard drive in short order.

[ampguy]

at least historically, and all current sw licensing agreements I am aware of.

Originally Posted by Fedzilla_Bob

When there is reference to 4-way, does this mean that it is a "Quad" core? Or, is it 4 distinct processors?