Do I need a supercomputer to study chess? You can’t really do this with a personal laptop, that’s why GrandMasters spend money for a supercomputer. This is very common with opening position, as the GMs want to see if the machine can come up with novel plans or brilliant long-term tactics. The most common usage for these supercomputers is to leave them running for several hours (days, maybe!) to analyze a given position. They are not reading emails, watching videos or anything else in their chess computer. This is why professionals and GrandMasters use machines that are entirely dedicated to their chess activity. In your personal laptop, you probably want to keep this percentage not too high, so you can do other things too. Many strong chess engines are built in a way that you can adapt the hardware resources they use.

But they also need a lot of memory (RAM memory, not hard disk), because that’s where temporary results of all those calculations are stored in the middle of complex procedures. This is why you smartphone battery dries very fast!Ĭhess engines need to have good CPUs, because CPU is the part of your computer where computations are actually made. In layman terms, when you run your chess engine (Stockfish, Komodo, Houdini, and many others) in your computer or smartphone, you are actually running a software program that does a lot of CPU-intensive operations. They use it because of the intense CPU & RAM usage that powerful chess engines make.

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