I'll pick up the comment I made earlier about making a Go hardware with DSPs and FPGAs.
I looked into the details of couple DSPs. The one that I think is suitable is the 561 Blackfin from Analog Devices. It has a maximum core speed of 700 MHz so far and costs $39/each in 1000 quantity. It has two 32 bit cores with 32k L-1 cache memory each and a 128k L-2 cache memory. With some limitations it can execute 3 commands in parallel, one 32-bit, two 16-bits. Most operations in computer Go is 16 bits. So this is good. It can count the number of 1's in a 32-bit with a single instruction. It can interface to FPGAs in two ways. It can allocate 64 Mbyte memory space to FPGAs with programmable interface parameters. Or one can use its two 16-bit parallel interface ports.
There is one catch that the assembler and C/C++ compiler costs $3,500. There is a free compiler available, but it's for the signle core chip of the product line. I'm looking into the possibility of porting this single core software to the dual core chip. This software is for Linux.
Another possible DSP processor is the 6000 series from Texas Instruments. It has a maximum core speed of 1.0 GHz. It's a 64-bits supercaler that can execute multi-commands in a single instruction.
Daniel Liu
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