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

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 19:28:21 04/26/01

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On April 26, 2001 at 22:10:14, Robert Raese wrote:

>On April 26, 2001 at 19:58:43, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>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.
>
>ok this is probably a stupid question, but isn't 20mhz kind of slow for such
>advanced hardware?  what am i missing?

Not particularly.  These are ASICs and they do a _bunch_ per cycle.  In fact,
it takes just 10 clock cycles to handle one node...  That translates to
several thousand machine language instructions for the typical chess problem.

20mhz was slow.  Hsu had planned on a 15X faster chip without really pushing
the fabrication limits of today...  He even posted once that 30M nodes per
second per chip was easily doable...

Don't confuse 20mhz in a special purpose finite state machine vs 20mhz in
a microprocessor...  they are really not comparable...





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