Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 16:45:00 07/02/98
Go up one level in this thread
On July 02, 1998 at 16:42:50, Tim Mann wrote: >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 the main difficulty is in thinking about the application in terms of a finite state automaton, rather than a procedural-oriented piece of software as most now do. I've programmed these things in the past, and they are actually fairly simple devices, but using them efficiently becomes a headache since (at least when I did it) there was no good "silicon-type compiler" I could use to help me...
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