Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 12:38:11 02/17/04
Go up one level in this thread
On February 17, 2004 at 15:23:57, Bob Durrett wrote: >On February 17, 2004 at 13:01:24, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On February 17, 2004 at 12:25:18, Anson T J wrote: >> >>>On February 17, 2004 at 10:30:32, Robert Hyatt wrote: >>> >>>>On February 17, 2004 at 08:41:16, Bob Durrett wrote: >>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>>The fact is that Hydra whipped a bunch of conventional chess computers at >>>>>Paderborn. That fact is indisputable. >>>>> >>>>>How??? >>>>> >>>>>How could Hydra, chugging away at the clock rate of a slow snail, win against >>>>>the high-nps conventional machines? >>>> >>>> >>>>I don't understand the question. Hydra probably hit speeds of 15-20M nodes per >>>>second. How is that "a slow snail"??? >>>> >>>>It was the fastest thing playing there by a factor of at least 4x... >>> >>>I think he is talking about the clock speed of the boards. I don't know the >>>clock speed of the boards but I would imagine they are slower than GHz. >> >>Yes, but who cares? It is the NPS that determines how fast a chess program >>searches, and their NPS was above anything else by a big margin. > >Bob, please indulge a "slow learner." I still don't get it. Are you saying >that the best way to get ***really*** high nps rates is with hardware [maybe >such as used by Hydra?] as opposed to using a PC? > >Incidentally, I am really feeling ignorant right now. How did Hydra get such >high nps? > >I hope you don't mind helping a beginner along on this confusing stuff. [Mark >thinks I'm pretty dumb.] A general purpose CPU will have to have a bunch of instructions that means: "Move the knight on this square to that one." A chess processor can have a machine instruction encoded into hardware that means the same thing. A general purpose CPU will have to look at a bunch of attack tables to figure out if it is in check. A chess processor can know instantly because it was designed into hardware. It is not easy to make a field programmable gate array run at 1 GHz. So a general purpose CPU runs very fast but it has to do a lot of simple things compounded together to make simple chess decisions. An FPGA will not run as fast, but a single instruction can produce the final answer. A general purpose CPU is a cheap commodity item because they are made by the millions. The millions of dollars spent developing the CPU are amortized over millions of CPUs to defray that cost. An FPGA is also expensive to make and they will not sell ten million chess FPGAs. So the net cost per item will be very high. The speed of general purpose CPUs grows exponentially. So something that is twice as fast this year will be the same speed next year and half as fast the year after that.
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