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Subject: Re: The art of debate

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 23:20:24 01/26/00

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On January 26, 2000 at 23:50:45, Ernst A. Heinz wrote:

>>What on earth are you talking about?  I never said anything about sending DB
>>40,000 instructions.  I said Hsu might be thinking of the number of different
>>"things" he does in the chip...  which doesn't necessarily mean that those
>>translate directly to x86 assembly instructions.  IE when I (using bitmaps)
>>ask the question "is this pawn passed" I think of that as one operation,
>>because it _is_ using bitmaps.  In Cray Blitz, it was _not_ one instruction
>>by a long shot...
>>
>>You have two different expertises trying to talk with a common language.  I
>>would not assume that Hsu meant 40K x86 instructions.  I would not assume
>>he meant 40K gates.  I would not assume he meant 40K "things" on the chip that
>>get done for each node.  In short, I wouldn't assume anything, I would ask.
>
>Hey you two fighting cocks ... :-)
>
>Let me quote from Hsu's IEEE Micro article again (page 72).
>
>"The chess chips provided enormous computational power.
> On a general-purpose computer, the computation done by
> the chess chip for a single chess position requires
> *** up to 40,000 general-purpose instructions ***. At
> 2 to 2.5 million chess positions/s, one chess chip
> operates at the equivalent of a 100-billion
> instruction/s supercomputer."
>
>Clear enough now? Hsu's estimate obviously reads:
>
>1 chess chip ~= 40,000 general-purpose CPU instructions
>                       per node
>
>=Ernst=

Yes. I guess it's not obvious to some people that the x86 is a general purpose
CPU.

Of course, some people may argue that FHH meant RISC instructions and not CISC
instructions. But then the DB chip is less impressive--it takes more RISC
instructions than CISC to accomplish almost anything.

-Tom



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