Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 14:48:15 09/19/01
Go up one level in this thread
On September 19, 2001 at 05:02:53, David Blackman wrote:
>On September 18, 2001 at 13:51:07, Ian Osgood wrote:
>
>>Has anyone run across a chess program written in Forth? I ask because I
>>recently ran across an asynchronous processor design optimized for Forth
>>(designed by the creator of Forth, in fact) which claims 2.4 Bips (or 60 Gips
>>for the 25x parallel version) dissipating only 10mW.
>>
>>Link: http://www.mindspring.com/~chipchuck/25x.html
>>
>>Ian
>
>That particular chip has 384 words DRAM and 128 Words ROM for each processor. A
>strong chess program needs a lot more memory than that, and will spend most of
>its time going to the much slower off-chip ram. Also the 2400 Mips is not quite
>the same as other poeple would count Mips. A forth chip instruction doesn't do
>much. So don't expect this chip to be an unbeatable monster chess machine.
As a chess programmer I often wish I had faster instructions at my disposal,
even if they were doing less. Maybe I could adapt to this 27 instructions and
take advantage of the speed.
384 registers is not so bad when you think about it. At least I know what I
would do with 64 of them, if you see what I mean. Having the chessboard in
registers is a dream for a chess programmer! Together with the 16 levels stack
and the remaining registers, memory accesses would be very sparse. I don't think
that memory bandwidth would be a problem.
I find the design of this chip very interesting. However it is true that it has
been around for a while (at least the f21 and x18), so if it was as great as it
seems then certainly you would find it at the heart of many handhelds. But it's
not the case. So I wonder what the catch is (the 18 bits address bus and word
length maybe?).
>The idea of doing a chess program in Forth doesn't appeal much to me, but it
>certainly should be possible. The best language for a chess program is usually
>the language the programmer knows best.
The performance of the existing compilers counts also. C is great for chess
because you can program at the low level, AND with the performances of current
compilers you get very close to the speed of assembly programming (only 1.5
times slower I guess).
I would not say the same for Cobol for example.
Christophe
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