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Subject: Re: hardware math

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 09:17:32 10/11/02

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On October 11, 2002 at 11:25:01, Jeremiah Penery wrote:

>On October 11, 2002 at 11:07:52, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>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.
>
>Only because the latter will never exist. :)
>
>>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.
>
>I was just using that as an example of what is possible.  It could be done
>today.  Obviously, we know it won't be.  The whole argument is theoretical.
>
>>Secondly, that 0.13 process technology including the big salary from Hsu
>>would be around 20 million of investments.
>
>That's true, but if IBM were still sponsoring it, I doubt they'd have much
>problem providing that kind of money.  After all, DB made them WAY more money
>than that in marketing terms.
>
>>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
>
>Nullmove should not be all that hard, since they already used it for threat
>detection.  Does anyone know how they did move ordering in DB?  We can't say
>whether it was efficient or not without knowing.  As far as evaluation, they
>already did a lot of things according to Hsu's paper about it.  I'm sure if they
>were going to do another redesign with today's hardware, they could find a lot
>more things to add.

If vincent would just shut up and read Hsu's book, he would be _amazed_ to
discover that the current DB processors already have the ability to do a
null-move
search.  Hsu just chose not to.  But he designed the option into the chips.  Of
course,
reading anything is not Vincent's strong point.  Making ridiculous statements is
really his forte'.




>
>>   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.
>
>Yep.
>
>>   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.
>
>Yep.  But if they don't have hashtables you complain how they can't possibly get
>some depth without it. :)
>If price is not the object, they should be able to use at least some very fast
>SRAM, even if it's not very big.

Again, had vincent read Hsu's book, he would _know_ that the DB chess chips had
included a shared transposition table facility.  Hsu simply did not have time to
design
the necessary memory and have it put together in time for the 1997 match.  But
the
chips _could_ do this.  In fact, at the speeds they operated at (20-24mhz) there
would
be no problems interfacing to DRAM rather than having to resort to pricey/big
SRAM.

1mhz = 1000 nanoseconds per cycle.  10mhz = 100 nanoseconds / cycle.  20mhz =
50ns
per cycle.  Since a node took 10 clocks, or 500ns, interfacing to DRAM would be
absolutely
trivial.




>
>>   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.
>
>If you're talking about selling it to the general public, it would never get
>done.
>
>>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 :)
>
>And?



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