Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 23:30:52 06/27/98
Go up one level in this thread
>And if the DB hardware is too big or hot to be inside an ordinary PC, it can be >placed in an external box with an expansion card to interface with it. But >would the PCI bus present a bandwidth bottleneck when compared with the >processor and DB chip speed? Or would the DB hardware have its own processor >which does the coordination between the DB chips. The new 3D chips coming out are probably at least as big and hot as a DB chip, and cooling them isn't a huge problem. Anyway, even if the PCI bus doubled the amount of time the chip took to search a position, it would still be a tremendous gain. Let's consider these random-ass figures: 32 bit PCI bus, 33 MHz transferring a position (say, 256 bytes) = 30 ns * (256/4) = 1920 ns * 2 (miscellaneous overhead) = 3840 ns to get a chip started on a position time for a chip to search the position: 4 ply search in 100,000 nodes (no null move, etc.) say, 50,000 evaluations (1.5 clock cycles) another 5,000 move generations (4 clock cycles) clock cycle = 10 ns (100 MHz) -> 950000 ns to search a position So, taking these phenominally conservative numbers, transmitting the position still only takes 0.5 percent of the time it takes to search it... Cheers, Tom
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