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

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 12:46:09 12/16/99

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Aside from not having registers or stacks or memory, trying to build any sort of
bus at all is a bummer. So good luck trying to get moves and board positions
from one side of the chip to the other...
-Tom

On December 16, 1999 at 14:50:53, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>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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