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Subject: Re: HW based Crafty (Boule's thesis)

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 19:53:53 04/04/02

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On April 04, 2002 at 13:25:59, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>>On April 03, 2002 at 17:49:58, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>ASICS used in the original DB hardware...  3 micron ASICS in DB only ran at
>>>24mhz.  An FPGA can certainly be run at that clock speed...
>
>I didn't write very clearly.  Chiptest and deep thought (the original deep
>blue hardware) was, I believe, 3 micron.  DB1 and DB2 were complete re-designs
>using smaller die sizes.  This is mentioned in his book, when/if it comes
>out...

It's not that what you wrote wasn't clear, it was simply wrong. "3 micron ASICS
in DB..."

>>be slower. But if you take the optimistic 50MHz number and the very overly
>>optimistic 2-cycle-per-node number, you get 25M NPS, not "30M NPS easily."
>All I really know about the DT chip was that it took 10 cycles per node...
>although some cycles were skipped (fast vs slow eval for example)...  I based
>the 30M nps value on statements made by Hsu...

Statements made by Hsu about ASICs, not FPGAs. I cannot stress enough how
completely different the two are.

IIRC, DB could do a fast eval of a node, which took 2 cycles, and a slow eval,
which took 8 cycles.

It occurs to me that the DB chips were running at ~25MHz with the same feature
size as the 200MHz PPro. With CPUs running at ~100MHz in FPGAs, you might expect
FPGA chess logic to be half as fast as the DB ASICs, i.e., ~1M NPS. So while
FPGA chess is a very interesting project, I'm not sure I'd expect it to be any
faster than chess software.

-Tom



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