Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 19:38:40 01/27/00
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On January 27, 2000 at 21:14:25, Robert Hyatt wrote: >No... what I said was that I knew what Cray Blitz did internally, and how it >worked. And I was _still_ surprised by how much slower the PC would execute Okay, if your only point was that you were surprised going from A to B, then that's fine. The reason for my "confusion" is a comment that you made a few posts ago: >The point is on "what" architecture? 40K on a sparc == 20K on an X86. And then you begin talking about how much you can do with Cray instructions. I'm sure you can see why I might think your point was something else. >What is the difference between 40K and 400K instructions? Significant enough I remember that MChess was running at ~2,500 NPS on a 133MHz Pentium in 1995. 133M / 40k = 3,300 Hsu's estimate implies that DB would run a little faster than MChess. If the estimate is off by a factor of 2 either way, I don't think it makes a huge difference. But if the estimate is "optimistic" by a factor of 10, that means DB would search 250 NPS, which I don't consider reasonable for a chess program. >>It doesn't matter HOW he thought he could compute the term, only only matters >>that it's POSSIBLE. >But it _does_ matter. Otherwise how do you do the computation? And are you >thinking in terms of what is easy in hardware? Have you ever written a piece >of code, thinking when you started that it would be 2K lines of code, but ended >up 20K? I would never have guessed that Crafty would end up at nearly 50K and >still growing. But that argument goes both ways. I doubt that he would consistently underestimate how much work it takes to evaluate every single term. >Anything is possible. I simply take that "number" as a "SWAG" to make a point >that a _lot_ of things are going on inside DB's processor. If _I_ had written >that article, I would probably have guessed "low" to be conservative, since >everyone seems to want to jump all over any significant claims he makes... But there is another opposite argument here: he wants to make his chip seem as cool as possible. Until we know more, I don't see why we can't just assume that Hsu is right. You're coming up with every reason for his estimate to be low, but I could be arguing that his estimate is high just as aggressively. The point is, neither of us seems to know anything besides the actual estimate, so I don't see why we can't just take it on faith for now. -Tom
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