#7145·Stockfish

No option to force specific architecture when running a universal build

Author: 13xforeverCreated Sep 9, 2026Updated Sep 9, 2026

Describe the issue

In #6740 and adjacent PRs the official build pipeline was switched to produce universal binaries that try to detect and run the optimal architecture-specific build, but selecting the "best" supported architecture does not produce the optimal performance in all cases. There's an explicit exception of older zen models with slow pext for example, but that's about it.

You can not account for all permutations of OS and specific hardware, so it would be beneficial to still have an option to force override the selected target architecture either though configuration/command line option or by still providing every target build separately in official capacity.

Expected behavior

Users can manually select what target architecture build to run.

Steps to reproduce

n/a

Anything else?

I understand that people who are most interested in this can probably compile their own binaries, but I also think having the officially provided option is still valuable for benchmarks etc

Operating system

Windows

Stockfish version

Stockfish 19

Source: official-stockfish/Stockfish