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

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 21:41:19 04/04/02

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On April 04, 2002 at 15:07:19, Keith Evans wrote:

>On April 04, 2002 at 13:27:08, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On April 04, 2002 at 13:10:20, Keith Evans wrote:
>>
>>>On April 04, 2002 at 04:07:42, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>>>
>>>>I know that simple, pipelined, carefully floorplanned, general-purpose CPU
>>>>designs run at ~100MHz on modern FPGAs. From what I know of the
>>>>Belle/Chiptest/DT/DB move generator, I'd expect its critical paths to be at
>>>>least twice as long, and probably longer. So I'd put an optimistic upper bound
>>>>of 50MHz on it. And that's just the move generator; I'd expect the eval logic to
>>>>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."
>>>>
>>>
>>>Let's brainstorm a little here - is there any way that we can use N move
>>>generators in parallel to increase the effective operating speed? What if one
>>>generator were to generate moves for the top half of the board, and another were
>>>to generate moves for the bottom half of the board? Any idea how much this
>>>changed move ordering would affect the size of the search tree?
>>
>>This was the HiTech approach.  64 processors, one per square...  Belle's
>>find-victim/find-aggressor approach was cleaner and ultimately faster...
>>
>
>Upon further reflection my idea seems dumb - doesn't make sense once you take
>into search into account. So another question is - is there a known way to run
>move generators/evaluators in parallel that is more efficient than what Hsu did?
>Any other tweaks to increase performance beside reducing delay? Maybe hash
>tables is it?
>
>Any simple way to estimate the performance increase of adding hash table support
>to a chess chip? (Assuming a single ported hash table.) A chess chip searching N
>[NPS] is equivalent to a chip searching N/M [NPS] with a S [entry] hash table?
>
>Regards,
>Keith


1.  I am sure there is room for more parallelism in various parts of the
chip, but remember that Hsu was a very good designer and (for example) his
evaluation _was_ highly parallel in its hardware implementation...

2.  Hashing would certainly help, particularly in endgames...  It isn't as
big a thing as some might suspect however, because it isn't easy to do a
"hash move" in the move ordering stuff since there is no move ordering in
the hardware except for MVV/LVA and other simple tricks...




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