Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: hardware math

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 08:07:52 10/11/02

Go up one level in this thread


On October 11, 2002 at 10:38:12, Jeremiah Penery wrote:

>Hmm, let's see.  If DB gets 'upgraded to 2002 standards", that would mean they
>can make a fully custom .13 micron chip running at 300MHz, able to do a full
>evaluation every clock cycle.  It will also have 20GB/s memory bandwidth to
>256MB of RAM for the hash tables on the board.  So one single chip will search
>300M positions/second, and they can do whatever evaluation they want.  Yes, yes,
>obviously a 'complete joke'.

I'm more afraid for Brutus in like 30Mhz FPGA than i am for a
deep blue at 0.13 micron.

First of all, deep blue wasn't written in verilog or any 'high level'
language. It was simply cut'n pasting the logics to each other.

So it would require an entire new design to make something for 0.13
in verilog or whatever.

Secondly, that 0.13 process technology including the big salary from Hsu
would be around 20 million of investments.

This versus a FPGA board with some tools you can get for a couple of thousands
of euro's (1 euro = 1 dollar at the moment about).

Further, Hsu would have to proof a number of things
   being capable of implementing all kind of things like
   nullmove, efficient move ordering, and a lot of evaluative
   things in hardware. it's not trivial to add ram to the
   chip, because a single cacheline from RAM is a lot slower than
   processing a bunch of nodes in hardware. If you run at 300Mhz
   with say 10 clocks a node on average, you can achieve about
   30 million nodes a second.

   However you can't do 30 million random word lookups a second in
   the RAM. latency is too big for that. It's not trivial to combine
   the 2 things.

   In fact crafty with 1 million nodes a second can't even do all requests
   to a hashtable.

An important point in the end is the price where this all gets produced for,
because you need to sell a bunch of these processors, or you won't get
back that $20 million of investments.

And in the end, when the cpu hits the market after say a year or 5,
then i'll be having a 4 processor 10Ghz intel/amd machine delivering
millions of nodes a second for DIEP :)

>>Of course it gets completely annihilated when appearing in 1997 standards.
>>
>>So if Hsu upgrades his chip to a single cpu chip with a new and better
>>evaluation (it's of course questionable whether he is capable of
>>manaqing that) then it will not search deeper than deep blue in 1997
>>of course, unless he adds nullmove and hashtables.
>
>The above paragraph has no basis in reality.



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.