Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 00:44:56 01/23/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 21, 2000 at 16:23:47, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >On January 21, 2000 at 15:10:32, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>After creating "cray blitz" I found it difficult to think about trying to >>write a program for a Micro. And it took a lot of time/effort to do so. After >>building DB, it would take Hsu a lot of time/effort to try to write a program >>for a Cray, and then more time/effort to think about a PC-based program. > >Well, presumably he wasn't an idiot and wrote the SP program in something >portable. Then all he would have to do is write a quiescence search function and >port the DB evaluation function. After designing the function in hardware, >remaking it in software should seem positively trivial. He already knows all the >terms anyway. How long could it possibly take? Definitely less than a week for a >"first draft," I would guess. > >Here's another thing I was just thinking about. DB had a "fast eval" that took 3 >cycles, and the full eval took something like 11 cycles. Most of the time, the >fast eval was good enough. Presumably the 40,000 instructions that he reported >was for the full-blown, 11 cycle eval. > >Here is my best guess at how fast a DB program would run on a PIII. Assume 75% >of the time it takes 11k instructions to eval, and 25% of the time, it takes >40k. So that's an average of 18k. Now, figuring that the PIII almost always >retires 1.5 instructions per clock cycle, it takes 12k clock cycles per node. >Now assume you're running at 800MHz. That's 66000 NPS, and it's still being >fairly conservative (with the 75%). That strikes me as a perfectly reasonable >speed; if I'm not mistaken, some strong micro programs run that fast on the same >hardware. > >As for putting in the effort to make such a program, I think that's a no-brainer >too. Imagine how much money he could make off of selling the DB program for PCs. >A million people would want a copy, the first day it's announced. And it >wouldn't even matter how strong it is. He could just write on the back of the >box, "This program runs 3000 times faster on the official DB hardware!" and >everybody will think it's terrific. > >Maybe you can think of a reason why he hasn't done this already... ASML sells machines to produce 0.18 micron for 13 million dutch guilder, roughly 6 million US$. Then assuming it has same speed as DB, Hsu gets confronted with the fact that he gotta do at least a 100 times less calls a second to the hardware, so he needs to do roughly 2.5 ply extra in hardware, say at 6 to 7 ply. This automatically means that less gets done in the search of the general purpose processor, so hash can not get used there. Hash at the 0.18 chessprocessor can't be done either of course, so that's an immense problem when trying to search above say 9 ply, knowing that deep blue in crucial positions got to 10 ply. Vincent >-Tom
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