Re: [computer-go] Computer Go hardware

[Vincent Diepeveen <diep@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:55 19-10-2004 +0100, chrilly wrote:
>>
>>For a few hundred USD you can buy a PCI card with a XilinX Spartan II but
>>the bus speed is in that case very low because they use a 8-bit PCI
>>interface on a separate chip.
>>
>Spartan-II is much too slow and small. These boards can be used for
>classroom exercises or very small prototype designs. 8-bit PCI is a joke.
>The interesting boards start at 1.500 USD. Virtex-I 1000 or Virtex-II is
>minimum for a serious design.
>Note: From Virtex-I to II was a huge gate inflation. The Virtex-II 1000 has
>much less logic than the Virtex-I 1000.
>Hydra runs currently on a Virtex-I 1000E.
>The next chip is a Virtex-II PV70. The chip alone costs >> 1000 USD.
>
>The problem with selling 10.000 boards is, that one has first to produce and
>PAY them. Lets say 100$/Board. Do you know someone who is willing to spend
>1Million $ in advance for a Go-Card? If yes, give me his number. You will
>get your share.

You can make 1000 of them also, but not for 100 a board. Additional 75000
dollar startup costs, in order for them to stop drinking coffee.

So for about a quarter million you get pretty far.

The real problem is therefore not the money, but the level of the chip
versus the price of the board.

Salesprice of a $150 combination including a cdrom and so on, will be sold
in the shops for roughly $500-$1000.

And that for a go program that gets kicked by top10 of the world is not
exactly worth the price.

Every small change in the go program, especially for pattern databases, you
need a lot of work in verilog to add it and another what is it, 24 hours or
so, to compile a new chip?

This where in software it's a peanut to add/modify something.

So for any software program above 1 million bytes of C code so to speak,
FPGA is horror & co as there will be maintainability problems there.

Every user which bought a hardware card, will not be able to update the
card at all. A development card you can 'compile' new versions at in
theory, but you sell chips which are not possible to modify, so they cannot
update the card *ever*.

In that sense chess is easier for FPGA than GO.

>Chrilly
>
>
>
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