Check out Glinski's Hexagonal Chess, our featured variant for May, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Dec 15, 2017 07:52 PM UTC:

Well, the 64-cores (or was it in reality 32 cores, with hyper threading?) setup used for Stockfish in the match was a bit more powerful that the 'typical PC', which nowadays is only 4 cores.

Note that the TPUs are not really more powerful than top-of-the-line CPU chips, in terms of number of transitors, or power consumption. It is just that they do completely different things Things useful for running AlphaZero. If AlphaZero would have to run on an ordiary CPU, it would be orders of magnitude slower. OTOH, if Stockfish would have had to run o a TPU, it probably would not be able to run at all.

But as applications using eural nets get more common, it is conceivable that future PCs will have a built-i TPU as a standard feature. There has been a time that floatig point calculations were considered such a difficult and specialized task that you needed a separate co-processor chip for them (the 8087) next to the CPU (he 8086). From the 80486 on, the floating-point uit was included in the CPU chip. TPUs might go the same way: first available on a plug-in card about as expensive as your motherboard (+ components), such as powerful video cards for gaming now, then as a  add-on feature on the motherboard itself, where you just plug in the optional chip, and then integrated on the chip itself. There is a limit to the usefuless of ever more cores for the average PC user; having more than two cores is already a dubious asset for most people. Having 2 cores plus a TPU would probably be much better, when neural networks will get more commoly used in software.


Edit Form
Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.