Author: Keith Evans
Date: 16:24:35 06/20/02
Go up one level in this thread
On June 20, 2002 at 18:24:59, Tom Glenn wrote: > Isn't the "Brutus" program based on development > of a new 'chess-chip' ......???? > > Kind of like a modern day 'ChessMachine' It uses an FPGA which is a type of programmable logic. (see http://www.xilinx.com/ and look for information on their Virtex parts if you're interested in learning more.) A custom chess chip would be significantly faster and cheaper to produce in volume than a FPGA, but the up front costs would be much larger. Plus since you would never ship any significant volumes of a chess chip you would end up pissing off your foundry since you would probably have to lie about your volume to get them interested in working with you. There is a service called MOSIS available which could enable a chip hacker to pull something like this off for low volumes, but still the tools that you need to do chip design are very expensive. I don't see it happening. However there might be some combination of cheap CPU + cheap FPGA which would prove interesting for small chess computers. The goal wouldn't be to beat the performance of the highest end desktop, but to give decent performance in a small package. Here's an interesting approach - Excaliber makes small chess computers and I believe that the chip is somewhat custom. If they went with the Arc processor in the future they could add a few custom chess instructions to get a little performace boost. -Keith
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.