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

Author: Greg Lindahl

Date: 12:51:32 12/20/99

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On December 19, 1999 at 10:18:32, Magnus Homann wrote:

>The problem with using the FPGA as a custom "co-processor" is that
>communicatuion CPU-FPGA likely swamps any other speedup you might get.

This is a worry, but less of one than you think. It takes about 1usec to grab
the PCI bus and communicate a few bytes to a card. However, once you're talking
to a PCI card and everyone is obeying the rules for write combining, etc, you
can communicate a fair amount of information in a short time.

Array processors are a classic example: it used to be worthwhile to move real
numbers over the bus in order to add them. Now it isn't. Encryption is another
example where a fairly large number of bytes have to be moved. Chess invovles
moving much less data than that.

-- g



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