OpenChess

Tuning the Split_Depth parameter on 4-core and 8-core hardware

The Split_Depth parameter defines the minimum depth at which work will be split between cores. This parameter can impact the speed of the engine (nodes per second) and should be fine-tuned if you're serious about getting the best performance out of your hardware.
The default value 10 is tuned for a Core i5-750 @2.66 GHz, but on other systems it may be advantageous to increase this to 12 or 13.
To select the best Split_Depth for your system you should analyze some positions for a fixed duration (e.g. 30 seconds) and measure the average nodes/second. Do this for all values of Split_Depth between 10 and 14, and keep the value that produces the highest average node speed.