Author: Tim Mann
Date: 13:42:50 07/02/98
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Digital (now part of Compaq) has a PCI board based on high-end Xilinx FPGAs, called the PAMette. There are five FPGAs on the board, four SIMM slots for additional RAM, and some other stuff. The price is $2495.00 to educational and research customers, about 100 times what you're aiming for, but you should take a look at the Web page, http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/pamette/. It has a lot of interesting information. As I understand it, PCI is very complex and ill-specified. It's possible to do a PCI interface in a Xilinx, avoiding the need for a separate PCI bridge chip -- and indeed the PAMette works this way -- but designing the circuit from scratch would be a major effort. The PAMette actually dedicates one of the Xilinx chips to the PCI interface, though perhaps there is enough room left on the chip to do other things too; I don't know about that. I get the impression from the hardware folks here that programming FPGAs is quite hard in general, and that there aren't many algorithms that actually run faster in an FPGA than on a general purpose sequential CPU. But maybe chess would be one of them... --Tim On June 29, 1998 at 18:57:34, David Fotland wrote: > >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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