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

Author: Greg Lindahl

Date: 17:00:05 12/22/99

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On December 22, 1999 at 11:19:34, Magnus Homann wrote:

>And how long does it take to read the data back? You'll get about 1-10 MB/s on
>the PCI bus, unless you watch out a bit.

It takes 1 usec to grab the bus, and then you can transfer either way. Since the
return value is tiny, the answer is: 1 usec.

For a graph of bandwidth vs. size of transfer, see:

http://www.myri.com/myrinet/performance/DMAperf.html

That page doesn't have any numbers for any Alpha 21264 systems, which are
substantially better.

>Really? So how much data do you typically move?

Well, Vincent says he needs 160 bytes for one eval. You might move N times this
at once. So, an average answer from the page above is ~ 10 MB/s for 160 byte
transfers, and > 50 MB/s for 1600 byte transfers.

> So far, I have no clue what you expect the FPGA to do.

Neither do I, as I've said repeatedly. However, if you want to know the impact
of the PCI bus on a design, it's well known. That was my only point in this
little sub-thread.

-- g



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