Author: Ernst A. Heinz
Date: 08:20:17 04/22/98
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On April 22, 1998 at 10:47:27, Mark Young wrote: >I heard that IBM has come out with a 6 billion move a sec. version of >Deep Blue. Is this true? Is there going to be a rematch that I have not >heard about? If not why did they come out with a new version? > >Im in bed with the flu and have a high fever. So if I did not hear CNN >right forgive me. > > Mark Young Whoever reported this fell for a typically clever marketing gag of IBM ... Today, IBM announced a new model of their RS/6000 SP parallel computer line with 332MHz CPUs. The announcement *claims* that these are up to 5x times faster than the CPUs of the Deeper Blue machine and, together with the special chess processors, *would* result in a hypothetical chess machine calculating *up to* 1 billion = 10^9 moves/nodes per second. Below I quote an excerpt of the original announcement: "Company Press Release New IBM Technology Faster Than Deep Blue RS/6000 SP Capable of a Billion Moves Per Second SOMERS, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 22, 1998-- Nearly one year after its historic victory over chess grand master Garry Kasparov, IBM today announced improvements to the RS/6000 SP that deliver five times the performance of Deep Blue. The improvement is the result of IBM's new 332 MHz microprocessor, the fastest chip available to date on the RS/6000 SP. If applied to the system that powered Deep Blue, this processor would increase its calculating power from 200 million to one billion chess moves per second." I personally do neither believe that the integer performance of new CPUs is 5x times higher than that of the ones used in 1997 -- maybe IBM intentionally compares the 332MHz CPUs to their 60MHz CPUs of the first match -- nor do I believe that their overall system performance scales linearly with the clock speed of the SP host CPUs. IMO, the "Deep Blue" part of the announcement is pure marketing hogwash ... =Ernst=
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