Author: Keith Evans
Date: 11:42:46 07/27/03
Go up one level in this thread
On July 27, 2003 at 07:37:31, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: >On July 27, 2003 at 06:31:58, Jonas Bylund wrote: > >>On July 26, 2003 at 17:22:02, Russell Reagan wrote: >> >>>On July 26, 2003 at 16:25:37, O. Veli wrote: >>> >>>>Since it is hardware, can >>>>we expect to be stronger than top software? >>> >>>I would expect it to be slower than top software, because cpu improvements >>>happen so quickly, and FPGA programming (from what I've heard) is not a simple >>>task. If he spends another two years working on it before releasing it (as >>>Slater said), just imagine how much faster the cpus will be by then. >>> >>>If you're talking about something massively parallel like Deep Blue, that is one >>>thing, but a single PCI card? I doubt that is going to do any better than break >>>even with top of the line hardware, so why bother? IBM threw so much hardware at >>>the problem that desktop cpu improvements wouldn't catch up for a LONG time, but >>>a single PCI card doesn't seem to be worth the trouble of programming the thing, >>>because desktop/server cpus will probably outperform it before too long. >> >>The way i understand it, the whole idea with running FPGA is that no matter how >>much knowledge you add, you won't lose speed, will that not more than compensate >>for the PC programs gain through faster hardware? > >Quote from Chrilly Donninger Paderborn, februari a few years ago (98 or my >memory says 99 now): > "I do not believe in knowledge at all Vincent. You are taking the wrong path. >Nimzo in fact only grew stronger when i REMOVED knowledge from it". > >Someone who always follows simple solutions i could not possibly believe he >manages to put a lot of knowledge in hardware. Where 'a lot' is measured by 2300 >FM standards. I think that the point of doing an FPGA engine is that you're planning on adding more knowledge than the software only solutions have, or you're trying to run at a higher NPS with equivalent knowledge. If you took almost all knowledge out except for material count/piece square tables, then a software only solution on today's top CPUs will probably run at a similar speed to an FPGA implementation. My guess would be that today's FPGAs would run at somewhere between 2-5 million nodes/s with a Belle style move generator depending upon how much effort one spends doing a good place and route to maximize the operational frequency. (Maybe there's a better way to implement a move generator, but I don't know it. Also maybe I'm a bit pessimistic about the operating frequency.) Given how large the Xilinx Virtex2 FPGAs have gotten, it's a good time to start doing some experiments if one is interested in this sort of thing. (Especially if the price is irrelevent.) With the right FPGA platform you could implement a decent move ordering, and have quick access to hash tables without worrying about things like TLBs. With an FPGA only platform (no memories connected to the FPGA) it's going to be hard to get a decent branching factor. Plus doesn't this add some excitement to computer chess? Some people want a standard platform for competitions, but I think that it was more exciting when you had a really wide variety of platforms. Even though I'm not a big fan of Chrilly, I have to applaud Chessbase and Chrilly for taking a novel approach. (Yeah - they're not the first...) -K
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