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

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 19:32:58 04/26/01

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On April 26, 2001 at 22:05:28, Vincent Diepeveen 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.  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...
>
>200M nodes a second let's get to that. .7 i never read that number
>anywhere, woudl be amazing if you can keep 'em busy for .7 considering
>a single SP processor addressed 30 processors...

You don't understand how it worked.  It is trivial to drive them at 100%
duty cycle, but then the SP processor would be waiting on the chess
processors.  It would be a rare case where the speed of the chess processors
synced up with the speed of the SP so that _everything_ could run at 100%.



>
>Anyway the question of Rajen was probably : "why does Hsu think that
>if he builds a new cpu it is as powerful as hundreds of chips which
>in 1997 shaped deep blue 2".
>

Yes, but he misunderstood my statement.  I wasn't talking about a single
chip at 1B nodes per second.  That was the peak NPS for the deep blue
hardware.  480 processors * 2.2M nodes per second (average of 2.0 and 2.4)
per processor.




>Well that's easy to answer. The deep blue chips were even in 1997 made
>from outdated technology. 0.60 microns. Todays standard is 0.18. Note
>GEOFORCE3 graphics card is already 0.15 microns and real soon we'll
>see 0.12 or 0.13 whatever getting used.
>
>Suppose Hsu would redesign those 20Mhz and 24Mhz processors (new info
>to me btw) in 0.12 or 0.13 technology, then a single cpu would be
>faster as 480 chessprocessors were in 1997. I don't doubt that!

I do... I don't think it would run hundreds of times faster.  He _might_
drive it to 500mhz to 1ghz...  500mhz would be 25 times faster.  1ghz would
be 50 times faster.  I doubt it could go faster than that..




>
>I have no idea to how many Mhz it would be clocked but it sure would
>be way faster!
>
>Compare for example that we can buy machines of 1 Ghz. I remember
>still a few years ago i had a 20Mhz 386sx (16 bits/32 bits) machine.
>that's more as a factor 50 difference in speed though in advantage of
>my nowadays fast Ghz machine :)
>
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>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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