Author: Slater Wold
Date: 08:17:46 04/10/03
Go up one level in this thread
On April 09, 2003 at 17:49:37, Keith Evans wrote: >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. That sounds good enough to start with. Right? >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...) Sounds fine to me. >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. That sounds, reasonable. >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. If you want to do this, we for sure can. >Regards, >Keith
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