Best hardware for chess engines?

Hi all,

I'm very much into using chess engines for practice. And I would like to know what the best hardware is for them.

I am not very knowledgeable when it comes to these things. So I'm hoping someone can clear up things for me.

First, there's that popcount thing. I know, it's been discussed everywhere.  All I need to know is how to see if a CPU supports it. Which I'm finding surprisingly challenging. I googled "Amd ryzen threadripper popcount (and to be sure popcnt) as well" and the search didn't find the term. Trying to figure it out further got me too confused about it. After I tried to understand the wiki on SSE4 it got too technical for me.

Then the GPU. All that is important is that it supports CUDA, right? I've been looking at a dual Titan RTX setup and it seems to fit. But Nvidia also has the A100, T4 and two types of Tesla cards. And that's where I get lost as well.

RAM, I get that part. 

HDD, that as well. 

Am I missing something?

Another way to understand it a little better is through this question: what is the absolute best setup for chess engines when it comes to systems available to regular consumers? With price being no issue.

I wish someone who really knows this stuff would write a detailed explanation about all this. In layman's terms. That way it can be referred to without people having to ask and try to figure it out over and over again. Especially when updates are needed due to both software and hardware progressing.

Btw, just so you know, I asked Chessbase's customer service about this and got no reply. I'm not too amused about this, since I'm a paying customer. I wanted to add that just in case you're tired of seeing these questions on here once again... I tried.

Your advice will be truly appreciated!

16 gigs in my current system. My question is related to upgrading to a new system though. And I'd probably go for a lot more ram in that one, just to be on the safe side. And to make it so the system is as future-proof as it can be.

For practice, any engine will run fine on any modern hardware, if the primary plan is playing against it.

For deep analysis, the more cores and the faster base clock speed is going to give the best performance. If you plan on using an engine that can run on GPUs, then that would also be a consideration, but it would probably be best to research the engine you want to use and see which GPUs perform best on. RAM is also important but you probably don't need to go insanely high there.

Thanks. It would be for deep analysis. And I use both regular and AI engines.

You are about a quarter of a century late for the OP to make sense