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Subject: Re: Hsu Presents a Paper at

Author: Nobuhiro Yoshimura

Date: 18:19:20 06/24/98

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On June 24, 1998 at 17:46:39, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On June 24, 1998 at 16:50:10, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>
>>
>>On June 24, 1998 at 13:49:04, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On June 24, 1998 at 13:33:41, Keith Ian Price wrote:
>>>
>>>>On June 24, 1998 at 09:07:50, Ernst A. Heinz wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>         Hot Chips 10 Advance Program
>>>>>
>>>>>              August 16-18, 1998
>>>>>    Memorial Auditorium, Stanford University
>>>>>            Palo Alto, California
>>>>>
>>>>>[...]
>>>>>
>>>>>2:30-4:00   Session 4:Specialized Chips   Alan Smith ,chair
>>>>>
>>>>>Designing a Single Chip Chess Grandmaster While Knowing Nothing about Chess
>>>>>   Feng-hsiung Hsu, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
>>>>>
>>>>>[...]
>>>>>
>>>>>Any computer-chess enthusiasts from the US going there ... ?
>>>>>
>>>>>=Ernst=
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>I wonder if it will just be his standard 1.5 hour talk with a new title for the
>>>>theme of the symposium. I could get down there relatively easily, if I thought
>>>>he could say anything in depth in 1.5 hours. I would guess it is just the same
>>>>presentation, though.
>>>>
>>>>kp
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>I'd suspect it is different, based on the conference.  But it also might not
>>>have much of the data we'd like to see.  IE I suspect that it will be less about
>>>chess, and more about how the hardware was designed to do certain time-critical
>>>functions efficiently, and how architectural problems were addressed over the
>>>evolution from chiptest to deep blue II.
>>>
>>>Would still be interesting to hear, but more from a hardware perspective, based
>>>on the "hot chips" title...
>>
>>
>>
>>Few newbie questions for Hsu, maybe someone can ask them or some of
>>them; first attempt to make a question list for Hsu:
>>
>>  -how big is the hashtable on that processor, or didn't he implement it at
>>   all at it?
>>
>
>Not sure... each group of chess processors has a shared hash, but each
>group can't see the hash from any other group.  No way to do a 256-port
>shared memory...
>
>
>>  -why doing a fixed depth at a processor, sounds very stupid to me
>
>they don't...  they just do the *last*  4 plies of the search, plus the
>quiescence, in their hardware.  This is dictated not by the speed of the
>chess processors by them selves, but how quickly the IBM SP2 front-end
>can feed them positions to search.  If you reduce this depth to 3 plies,
>the chess processors outrun the SP2 processors and have to wait.  If you
>increase the depth to 5 plies, the SP2 processors overrun the chess
>processors and they have to wait.  It's a balancing act.
>
>
>>
>>  -how fast is communications with his design with the mainframe/supercomputer
>
>hardware cycle time.  *very* fast, just like shared memory.
>
>
>>
>>  -how many cycles takes an evaluation at his hardware single chip?
>
>the chess processors can run at 24mhz, and search 2.4M nodes per second each.
>SO that factors into 10 clock cycles to do *everything* from generating moves,
>making moves, handling alpha/beta, doing the fast and slow hardware evals
>and so forth...  all in 10 cycles.
>
>>
>>  -what micron technology, 0.60?
>>  -what megaherz speed runs CPU at?
>
>chess processors at 24mhz.  Not sure about the SP2 they used, maybe
>300mhz per processor.
>
>>
>>  -how to design on CPU's knowledge depending things which depend on
>>   other knowledge in a smart and lossless way speed it up?
>
>
>cannot parse the above.. :)
>
>>
>>  -how many transistors on CPU (or does this sound cruel?)?
>
>
>I saw this number, but can't recall for the life of me.  Enough that
>they actually put some 3 piece endgame databases right on the chip to
>finish filling it out...
>
>>
>>  -how many dollars is pressing one CPU when pressing say 10,000?
>
>not super expensive, although I have not seen a price quote.  They
>used project "MOSIS" for the fabrication work, and a silicon compiler
>to design the thing...  That's all I recall...
>
>

The following statistics are for the chess-chip used in 1996, and
since he re-designed the chip for 1997, this number may be correct
at this point.

0.6 micron 3-metal CMOS
Over 1  million transistors
   About 111,000 gates in standard cells
   46 Ram blocks( from 64x8 to 1024x10)
   4 Rom blocks( from 128x13 to 4096x24)

details;
  Evaluation RAMs:  38Rams( 10K gates)
  Feature Extractor:  8x1 Array( 40K gates)
  Pawn Array: 8x8 ( 6K gates)
  Piece Square Rams
  Endgame Roms & Rams

  Move Generator:  8x8 Array( 37K gates)
  Datapath
  Move stack
  Search
  IO


Nobuhiro Yoshimura
>>
>>Greetings,
>>Vincent



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