Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 06:52:14 05/14/99
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On May 14, 1999 at 01:38:11, Gregor Overney wrote: >On May 13, 1999 at 09:10:05, Torstein Hall wrote: > >>I think a DB chip will kill all the Fritzes, Rebels, Nimzos, Juniors and Hiarcs >>of this world. What is the point in developing, or buying, something that is a >>lot weaker than the "Micro Monster" :-) >> >>But perhaps it could be made with a programming interface, letting other >>programs use it for search, and add their own evaluation functions etc.? >> >>Torstein > > >I am all ears if Feng-hsiung Hsu (or someone else) will succeed with this "DB >chip". Nevertheless, I am not aware of this project. Is it a non-IBM project? >Where did it get published that such a chip is in development? > >There are three good reasons why it is unlikely that this "DB chip will kill all >the Fritzes, ....". > >1) You just simple can't put DB on a single chip. Back to the drawing board on _that_ comment. DB _was_ based on a single VLSI chip. They then used 480 of them to do a very fast parallel search. Hsu, in the current issue of IEEE Micro has said that he is re-designing the chip using new fab facilities, and can make a single chip run 15 times faster than the chip used in "DB". IE a single chip will search about 36M nodes per second... > >2) You still need to write the correct algorithms to make this chip work. And >those algorithms are pretty complex (see evaluation functions etc.) > But it has _already_ been done. All that is left is to use the "new" fab process to increase density and clock speed.. DB's chess chips only ran at 20-24 megahertz. running that up to 16x faster seems quite easy with todays silicon capabilities as that would still be a modest < 400mhz processor. >3) It is not the first time, people try to design super-fast search engines on a >chip. Most of those efforts were gradually falling behind "real" CPUs. It's a >nightmare and not very profitable. Just look at those countless chips that have >been designed for image and speech recognition. A standard DSP with the right >software does the trick much cheaper. For chess, a solid SMP 64-bit architecture >and the right algorithms should always succeed. > > >Gregor But a special-purpose chip will _always_ be at least an order of magnitude faster than a general purpose solution. Always has, always will be...
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