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Subject: Re: FPGAs playing chess--an expert opinion

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 11:50:53 12/16/99

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On December 16, 1999 at 14:44:21, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>On December 16, 1999 at 14:02:42, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:
>
>>Unfortunately, you asked him the wrong question. The FPGAs were not intended to
>>replace the PowerPC chips used in DB, they were to replace the custom chips that
>>did chess search and evaluation. You could ask your friend if he thought that
>>today's FPGAs could replace a moderately complex ASIC of three years ago.
>
>I actually gave him the specifics of the Deep Blue chips, so he knew exactly
>what the question was. Realize that the DB chips are similar to general-purpose
>processors in terms of logic. I'm sure that by "modern processor" he means
>anything made within the last decade (or so).
>
>-Tom


The real headache with FPGAs is that they have some important missing things
that the DB chips have.  ie on-chip RAM for various hardware stacks, and so
forth.  One such example is the repetition detection that has to store a stack
of positions to test for rep matches...  Not to mention registers...  etc...

All that stuff ends up being 'off-chip'...



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