Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 13:25:46 11/24/03
Go up one level in this thread
On November 24, 2003 at 16:19:20, Slater Wold wrote: >On November 24, 2003 at 16:14:12, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On November 24, 2003 at 15:05:53, Pete Rihaczek wrote: >> >>>I for one am very excited to see Brutus in the lead. This is an exciting advance >>>in chess computing and FPGA computing in general. With the ability to add >>>knowledge without the usual penalty, some version of this is the odds-on >>>favorite to be the world's strongest chess machine. Such a system was a logical >>>step after Deep Blue II had shown the advantages of computing in hardware. Can a >>>Kasparov-Brutus match be far away? Well done Dr. Donninger! >> >> >>I don't think it is _that_ revolutionary. IE a single FPGA board and >>computer together search about 2.5M nodes per second, according to comments >>by them when we have played a few skittles games on ICC. A dual-CPU opteron >>is faster than that, as a reference point. > >Bob, Bob, Bob... > >A PC can get 2.5M nps, sure. But with what program? HIARCS? > >A FPGA can get 2.5M nps, and then you can stuff 100,000 lines of chess knowledge >in it, and still get 2.5M nps. That's a big difference. The problem is this. While you are "stuffing those 100,000 lines of chess knowledge in it" the PCs are _still_ getting faster. The FPGAs are simply not _that_ fast. See my comparison with Belle and Deep Thought. Those represented _quantum_ leaps in performance. The FPGA does not, yet, if it ever will. > >>yes, I know that he is running with four machines, two FPGA cards per machine >>in Graz. But then again, 8-way opterons are around as well. I'm hardly >>"anti-hardware" but the benefits to using hardware normally far-surpass >>readily available general-purpose computers. IE belle did 160K when the >>fastest competitor was 20K (Cray Blitz). Deep thought went to 1.5M when we >>were at 200K with the fastest hardware Cray had at the time. The FPGA >>approach doesn't have that significant speed advantage. IE a single card >>at 2.5 M nodes per second is within reach of a single processor machine >>today...
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