Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 07:01:38 09/02/05
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On September 02, 2005 at 06:45:23, Robert Hollay wrote: > > In some earlier threads we can read: Hydra has a "hardware based" chess >program, >the other chess programs are "software based". >Can somebody explain (in easy to understand way) what are the main differences? A hardware based program is one where the CPUs are not general purpose CPUs like Intel Xeons or AMD Opterons. They are special collections of transistors called Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). These FPGAs will not have general purpose instructions like "Move the value 5 into register zero" or "Multiply register zero by the contents of register one" but rather: "Move the knight on d3 to f4". A hardware based chess system cannot be used to sort your database or compile your C program or send an email. They can only do chess instructions. These systems will also have some general processors used to coordinate the FPGA activity and some general purpose software, usually written in C or C++ that is used to accomplish those sorts of purposes. The general format will be to create a card which is a pretty much self contained chess machine, but which can also be coordinated to work in groups or clusters of cards. In general, the hardware approach will be a little faster than a software approach on a small scale and a lot faster than a software approach when a very large number of cards are used. However, the hardware approach will be very very expensive. >AFAIK each computer consists of hardware and software. Hydra must have a good >software to play such a strong chess, the brute hardware alone is not enough... > If another chess program runs on 8 processors, why that program is not >"hardware >based"? No. The software based approach does have merits. For instance, an 8 CPU version of crafty will run at about 10% of Deeper Blue's speed. At perhaps 1% of the cost. And ten years from now, the same amount of dollars will buy a chess machine that is much faster than Deeper Blue. Off-the-shelf hardware gets exponentially faster over time. The custom built integrated circuits are what they are. You can buy more of them to scale up the speed, but they will not get faster and faster like commodity CPUs. So, if you want the world's fastest chess computer, you can spend ten million dollars and have it in one year. Or you can wait ten more years and buy it for $10,000 with off-the-shelf hardware. > Why is Hydra so different from other chess computers? It is like Deeper Blue and Belle and other custom hardware. It is unlike Shredder and Zappa and other strong software solutions. >TIA, Robert
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