Hardware assist

[Nicolai Czempin]

(I even considered building special hardware to do it: replace the DRAM chips in my computer for Video Rams, that had special memory cycles that could copy an entire memory page to the video shift register, or back. With that I could have copied (1K-aligned) memory blocks of 1 KB in two memory clocks! Still have the chips somewhere, never built it... )

Incidentally, has anyone played around with ab(using) the monster GPU power that we have nowadays for chess engine purposes?

[Jonatan Pettersson]

I'm kinda interested in hearing about this as well.

The GPU processors are insanely fast with float number calculations (hmm.. badly translated perhaps).

A Pentium 4 3ghz processor can do about 6 billion float calculations per second.

The Radeon X1950 XTX can do 375 billion.

So from one Radeon graphics card you get the power of 62.5 3ghz P4 processors.

There's some power there ready to use.