Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Interesting hardware.

Author: Dave Gomboc

Date: 07:55:08 02/01/00

Go up one level in this thread


On February 01, 2000 at 02:36:19, Jeremiah Penery wrote:

>On February 01, 2000 at 02:33:06, Jeremiah Penery wrote:
>
>>On February 01, 2000 at 02:30:27, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>>
>>>On February 01, 2000 at 02:22:09, Jeremiah Penery wrote:
>>>
>>>>On February 01, 2000 at 01:47:19, David Blackman wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On January 31, 2000 at 12:32:28, Dan Andersson wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>The link http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000128S0008 describes briefly a DSP
>>>>>>on a memory chip. DSPs might still rule the world! If they wern't so dang hard
>>>>>>to use.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Regards Dan Andersson
>>>>>
>>>>>Has anyone written a chess program that spends 95% of it's time doing long
>>>>>vector dot products? (Mine certainly doesn't.) If so it should really fly on a
>>>>>DSP chip. Actually, if the low-latency lookup tables were RAM instead of the sin
>>>>>and cos lookup ROM that most DSPs have, then i think you could just about do a
>>>>>fast, smart static eval function on a DSP.
>>>>>
>>>>>Another piece of fast hardware that is already installed in many PCs is the 3D
>>>>>graphics card. For a few hundred dollars you can get one that does many
>>>>>GigaFlops, as long as what you want to do is render textured triangles. If you
>>>>>design the textures really carefully, and line up multiple overlapping textured
>>>>>triangles just right, maybe you could get it to do chess move generation and
>>>>>eval really fast. But it wouldn't be easy.
>>>>
>>>>There are a bunch of other things these things can do:  texture effects, bump
>>>>mapping, z-buffering, bi-linear filtering, lighting/shading effects, etc.
>>>>A lot of the new cards also have lots of memory (up to 64MB) - Hash tables!
>>>>
>>>>I think it would be really cool if someone could figure out how to make a chess
>>>>program using this stuff. :)  I suspect it would have to communicate directly
>>>>with the main CPU to do some stuff, and it could also use the main system
>>>>memory.  Perhaps the 3D card could handle move generation and evaluation, and
>>>>the main CPU could handle the rest...
>>>>
>>>>Jeremiah :))
>>>
>>>DSP, graphics chip... you guys need to get the hard drive controller in on this,
>>>too.
>>
>>I don't think it does enough FLOPS. :)
>
>But maybe the sound card would work... I know some of them now have quite some
>processing power.  The EMU401K chip on the SBLive! I think can be reprogrammed
>from software to do a bunch of stuff.  With all the stuff it already does,
>perhaps it would make a nice addition to the "Use your _whole_ computer to play
>chess" project. :))

Well, I sure can't use that uh, "darn" sound card in Linux, so I might as well
use it for move generation!

Dave



This page took 0 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.