Author: David Fotland
Date: 15:57:34 06/29/98
Field programmable gate arrays range from 40,000 gates at $3 to over 500K gates with 270K bits of RAM, and can clock up to 80 Mhz. This is at least as dense and fast as the Deep Blue chips. See www.xilinx.com for example. It would be easy to put together a PCI card with one of these chips on it. Chess developers would then all have access to similar hardare technology as Deep Blue. If someone designed the basic hardware eval and search blocks, it would be easy for someone with a software background to modify the evaluation function and reprogram the FPGA. I did a short search and didn't find anyone already selling an FPGA PCI evaluation card, but there may be one. We may even be able to convince an FPGA vendor to design the PCI card for the publicity. If not I could do it, or anyone with a little bit of hardware background. Anyone interested in using or buying such a card? With a little volume the card would be inexpensive. Perhaps $25 since it just a small PC board, a cheap connector, and the FPGA chip (which would also be the PCI interface). David Fotland
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