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Subject: Re: The Appaling State of Dedicated Chess Computers

Author: Bo Persson

Date: 00:39:17 03/04/00

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On March 04, 2000 at 01:33:10, John Coffey wrote:

>On March 03, 2000 at 19:42:49, Fernando Villegas wrote:
>
>>I share your feelings but of course my thoughts -and surely yours too- tell me
>>that for a dedicated unit to just match what an average Intel chip can do with
>>a hard disk several hundreds of MB of size, you should pay an impossible amount
>>of money and for no reason. So we just have cheap dedicated units that does not
>>gives us 1/10 of features and strentght any freeware program gives, or we have
>>very expensive units that give us half an average PC program offers for 1/20 of
>>the price. No way.  I love, also, old steam locomotives, but if the day comes I
>>must go far away, I take one of my cars.
>>Cheers
>>Fernando
>
>
>So far the responders have just pointed out what stated in my post:  That
>dedicated
>units have not kept up with PC's.  But the question is why not?  If PC's can
>get a hundred times faster in 13 years then why not dedicated units?  Or at
>least cheaper?  As far as I can tell we are no better off than we were 10 to 13
>years ago.  This is a great a disappointment since in the mid to late 80's some
>dedicated units were as good or better than the PC's and much less expensive.
>

Yes, but the *PCs* have improved too much for anything to follow!
Selling in hundreds of millions over the last 10-13 years, it is the ultimate
mass product.

The whole PC is made up of high volume components. If you change some parts, to
make it a dedicated chess machine, it will cost *more*.

If you need a couple of million transistors on a chip, buy a $100 Celeron!
Designing your own will cost millions, ask Hsu...



Bo Persson
bop@gandalf.se



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