CPU benchmark advice

Say, any of you Robocoders have a fast quad-core machine (like Core i5/i7 or comparable) and feel like advising me? I'm considering buying a Core i7 (2600k) quad-core box that would mainly (for now) be for Robocode. But I'm wondering how much of a speed increase this will offer me.

• How long does a minimized 35-round battle of Diamond vs itself take? (Maybe run one then "Restart", if that helps JIT things up...) I'd need to know the Diamond version, Robocode version, and what CPU you've got to make full sense of that info.
• How much of a speed hit do you take per battle when running 4-threaded RoboResearch? Ie, if a given battle takes 60 seconds when you run single threaded, does it still take 60 seconds when you run 4 Robocodes, or how much of a hit does it take?

This would be a huge, geeky indulgence, so I'd love to get some idea what I'd be getting for my money if I actually pull the trigger. =) Thanks!

I have a much AMD Phenom II x4 @ 3.6 ghz. My AMD is considered slower then say a higher end i7.

You can see here for a ALU comparison. http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-2010/ALU-Performance-SiSoftware-Sandra-2010-Pro-ALU,2408.html

Mine is closest to the AMD Phenom II X4 975 Black Edition on this chart (Overclocked 965 to 3.6). Since Robocode is math heavy you can see the result each chip gets.

For a real performance reference see the amount of rumble I can perform an a given period (4 clients).

On this chart, the 2600K gets over twice the score of my CPU. 114.30 vs 55.0.

Well, pretty sure I've done 100k battles in a month, so this tells me it's 2.3x as fast. I probably wouldn't shell out $700 for double the Robocode power, but I'm guessing it's much more of a multiplier than that. Also, I reckon performance could scale differently with simple bots (many of your rumble battles) vs high-end bots, which are surely much more memory-intensive, and thus perhaps not as much sped up by an increase in raw CPU power.

So I'd still really love to know the time a certain battle takes and how close to linearly your Robocode power scales with # of cores...

I have done about 164359 battles so far, so about 41090 per client, 10 days in about so multiply that by 3 for a full month, only a total of about 123,270 per client. But that cpu is about twice mine in math, so estimate around 250,000 per client over a period of a month, so 2.5 times yours with a single client (even if you have more then 1 cpu, it only uses 1 cpu worth of cpu time). Times 4 for 4 clients equals about 1 million. This totals to about 10 times yours if you only run a single client, or 5 times with two.

All things being equal. However to answer you're original question. I do not know the exact amount of time it takes, but it isn't very long. Also as long as I stick to only 4 threads, the speed is equivalent to running only 1 thread if my computer is doing nothing else.

Because of intels hyperthreading, you may be able to get away with 5 or 6 threads without much overall hit.

Well, thx for the info. That assumes Robocode power scales linearly with benchmark scores, which is something I don't trust, or I wouldn't even be asking this. :-) And comparing RR client battle count is a very rough estimate, too. (Maybe I've done 150k? Don't remember, and who knows what bots or if that was full time...)

If anyone wants to serve up some cold hard battle times and single vs 4-thread comparisons, I'd still much appreciate it!