Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 11:41:49 04/20/05
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On April 20, 2005 at 12:33:24, Keith Ian Price wrote: > >IBM recently came out with their Power-5 module: > >http://static.userland.com/weblogsCom/images/wallyswisdomwarehouseweblogscom/8XPower5MCM.jpg > >This module has 4 dual-core multi-theaded Power PCs similar to the ones used in >the Mac G5. That makes for a total of 16 virtual cores, and IBM has a system >that ties 8 of these modules together with a 4GB/s bus for a total of 128 >virtual cores. The other four chips in the module are 4x36MB L3 cache. Since >Crafty already gets about 1500 kns on a fast processor, and the mult-threading >on a core offers about a 15-20% speedup, Crafty would likely exceed 100,000 kns >on a full system, especially if the hash tables could be kept in the L3 cache. >First, would it be possible to run a 128-thread version of Crafty? If so, do you >suppose that IBM might be interested in affording you the use of one of these, >as a Professor of Computer Science, to have a match against the self-proclaimed >successor to Deep Blue? I imagine they would get some good publicity having an >off-the-shelf IBM computer beat the specially designed chess computer in a >match. What do you think? Hard to say. The "dual-core" part sounds good. The other part about what appears to be a form of "hyper-threading" does not. HT for Crafty is actually a losing proposition after the changes Eugene and I worked on (with AMD) for the NUMA stuff last year. My dual xeon has HT disabled. But that aside, this could be a pretty powerful box. I've said all along that the FPGA approach is not a particularly attractive approach considering what could be done with an ASIC (ala' deep blue 2) vs a far slower FPGA solution. I would not be surprised if later this year the dual-core boxes were able to surpass the Hydra performance level, we will see...
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