One RTX 5090 vs a 12-GPU Cluster — Benchmarking a Decade of GPUs on the Same Go Proof

You don't need to know anything about Go to read this. The game is just the fixed yardstick. The story is a hardware benchmark: the same program, the same problem, the same settings — only the machine changed, from a 2017 GPU cluster to a single 2026 graphics card. That makes it a rare clean measurement of one decade of progress. What "solving" means here There are two very different things a computer can do with a board game. It can play it well — that's what AlphaGo did. Or it can solve it: mathematically prove the outcome under perfect play from both sides, leaving no doubt. Solving is the hard one. You explore an enormous tree of "if I play here, they play there…" move sequences until you have an airtight proof. Each node in that tree is one position examined. The target here is a single 7x7 opening called JA . In 2023, a NeurIPS paper ( Game Solving with Online Fine-Tuning , Wu et al.) proved its verdict — the attacker cannot win — using a cluster of twelve GTX 1080Ti GPUs running 384 parallel workers. The solver is guided by a neural network that estimates how hard each branch is, and crucially that network is fine-tuned online — it keeps learning during the solve. I rebuilt that exact solver (same code, same problem, same initial model, same search settings) and ran it on one RTX 5090 . It reached the identical proof . Everything but the hardware was held fixed, so the two runs line up as a generation-vs-generation benchmark — and it doubled as a full shakedown of the new Blackwell workstation. The numbers 1x RTX 5090 (2026) 12x GTX 1080Ti (2017) ratio Worker slots 24 384 1/16 the parallelism Per-slot throughput 284 nodes/s 141 nodes/s 2.01x faster Search work to proof 1.01B nodes 1.73B nodes 0.59x (41% less work) Avg work per sub-job 4,189 nodes 6,136 nodes shallower proofs Live model updates 4,007 208 19.3x more Wall-clock time 41.4 h 8.9 h 4.64x slower Verdict loss (proven) loss identical The single card finished slower in wall-clock time (41 h vs 9 h) — b