Author: Keith Evans
Date: 14:49:37 04/09/03
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On April 09, 2003 at 17:21:18, Slater Wold wrote: >On April 09, 2003 at 16:34:23, Keith Evans wrote: > >>I couldn't seem to email you at the address in your profile. > >I moved/got married in the last few months. A lot has changed. A whole lot. > >I will correct it asap. > >>I wanted to ask if you were still pursuing that FPGA project, or potentially >>would be if you had a knowledgable hardware guy to help out with the hardware >>side of things. > >I actually did a LOT of studying for about 6 months on FPGAs and HDL. However I >would never claim to know a whole lot, probably not even enough to make a >legal-moving chess engine. > >But that's not what stopped me. Money did. Not only are the FPGAs expensive, >but the software is just outrageous. Without a college/university connection, I >just couldn't find a way to do it. > >And one thing about me is, if I can't do it right, I won't do it. > >If you are offering your services (I know you have some connections), that would >for sure probably be enough to spark enough interest to get this going again. I thought that the cost might get to you. I may be able to get some basically old (not powerful enough) stuff at work, but it will take a little while before I'll know anything. The cool thing is that the FPGAs are loaded from CF, so I could email new hardware to you, and you wouldn't need anything other than a $20 (or whatever) standard CF reader on your PC. AFAIK this platform is more powerful than the stuff that Chrilly is using, but it would need to talk to the host over a serial port instead of PCI. You could ultimately fit a whole engine including big hash tables on it, so I don't think that the serial port would be a bottleneck. I would just have the PC handle the opening book and interface to Winboard/whatever. (There are 6 XC2V4000 parts on it if that means anything to you. Plus there are two DIMM sockets. Nope this wasn't powerful enough for us...) One of the things that keeps me from doing a project like this, is the knowledge that it would require a lot of software work to tune it, and a lot of brain power to analyze its performance. So I could focus on hardware and let you write software, test it, suggest features in English rather than writing them in Verilog. Anyhow I'll need some time before I would know for sure and get you involved, but I just wanted to see if you still had any interest. Regards, Keith
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