Re:FPGAs?
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, if you are going for speed you do want to use an FPGA. Even though there is an inherant iteration problem associated with determining the best move for Go, you can create a very parrallel algorithm that would search many different paths at the same time. Now if you are refering to the clock speed of FPGA's, then that is not an issue either. Even though most modern dual core and quad core processors can run at 2.4+ Ghz, they are most times limited to several levels of pipelining. This limits each processor to maybe 10 billion opperations per second.
Now with FPGA's, an average clock cycle that it would be run at would be around 200 Mhz. This may seem slow at first but once you realize that at this 200 Mhz clock speed you are calculating several thousand computations you will see that you can easily crush the 10 billion opperations per second of a normal processor and reach several trillion opperations per second with a single FPGA.
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Actually, if you are going for speed you do want to use an FPGA. Even though there is an inherant iteration problem associated with determining the best move for Go, you can create a very parrallel algorithm that would search many different paths at the same time. Now if you are refering to the clock speed of FPGA's, then that is not an issue either. Even though most modern dual core and quad core processors can run at 2.4+ Ghz, they are most times limited to several levels of pipelining. This limits each processor to maybe 10 billion opperations per second.
Now with FPGA's, an average clock cycle that it would be run at would be around 200 Mhz. This may seem slow at first but once you realize that at this 200 Mhz clock speed you are calculating several thousand computations you will see that you can easily crush the 10 billion opperations per second of a normal processor and reach several trillion opperations per second with a single FPGA.