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Subject: Re: to bob re:hsu's chip

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 16:58:43 04/26/01

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On April 26, 2001 at 18:11:20, Rajen Gupta wrote:

>hi bob: you mentioned in you recent post regarding hsu's chip being capable of
>doing 1 billion nodes per sec-is this an advanced version of the "chess chips"
>which were present oin the deep blue?-as far as i remember the deep blue had a
>number of general purpose powerpc processors and a number of what they termed
>"chess chips" if this is so

NO... here is the math.  DB2 used 480 chess processors.  About 1/2 of the
processors ran at 20mhz, the other half ran at 24mhz.  20mhz turns into 2M
nodes per second, 24 turns into 2.4M nodes per second.  The easiest way to
evaluate this is 480 * 2.2M nodes per second, which is roughly 1 billion nodes
per second peak.  He also reported that he drove the chess chips at about
70% duty cycle with the SP2.  So the actual NPS was 480 * 2.2M * .7, which
is roughly 700M nodes per second.  He scaled this back to 200M, I assume,
based on the search overhead which makes many of the nodes searched not
necessary if the search wasn't parallel.  IE in Crafty, on a quad xeon/700,
I search about 1.5M nodes per second peak.  But roughly 1/4th of that would
not be searched by a single cpu, so my "effective" nps is lower.  Say 1.1M or
so.

I assume this is why Hsu quoted 200M, because he certainly gave the 480
number, and the 2.0/2.4M nps per chip number in several different places...





>1)how can one single chip be twice as powerful as the entire deep blue, which
>had hundreds of processors?

You mis-read what I said.  I was talking about the peak NPS for the full DB2
machine.  1,000 M nodes per second.




>2)are these chess chips of deep blue and the superchip of hsu good for only
>chess calculations or can it act as a general purpose processor?

Special chess purpose only...



>
>thanks
>
>rajen



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