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Subject: Re: Chess processor boards for sale

Author: Keith Ian Price

Date: 13:08:01 06/27/98

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On June 27, 1998 at 02:08:03, Ed Schröder wrote:

>>Posted by Keith Ian Price on June 26, 1998 at 21:40:50:
>
>>Hello, Roberto,
>
>>When I talked to Hsu about this at the end of April, he said that IBM had no
>>intention of selling the chess processors as a PC product, but that he was
>>negotiating with them for the rights to the chips (1997 version), so that he
>>could possibly market such a product. There's a lot of "ifs" there, though. I
>>asked him some hypotheticals, such as: If there were a market for 1 million of
>>these boards, at what price point do you think you could sell them? He answered
>>$200. With a market of 10,000 that would double to $400. I agree with you that
>>this would be a great thing to experiment with, and I believe even Vincent would
>>shell out $400 real quick to test it. Hsu also said that his short eval took
>>only one cycle, and his long eval took 8 cycles. Move generation took 4 cycles.
>>The long eval was necessary in only 20% of the cases.
>
>It's my believe if things are done in the right way (have some ideas) Hsu
>can easily sell 10,000 pieces, more likely 25,000 pieces if not 50,000.
>
>I do not sell competitive software myself but I surely will make an
>exception if Hsu manage to enter the market with his chip. Everybody
>should simply have it and the better sold the lower the end-user-price!
>
>- Ed -
>


Well, this may be the way he would do it. Since he is basically the hardware
part of the team, and didn't really enjoy the software coding for the front-end,
I could see him offering the board and help interfacing to all the commercial
programmers who could guarantee a certain minimum of sales, or perhaps
exclusivity to the one guaranteeing the most. In any case at $400 or less, my
advanced order is in. Even if I have to upgrade to Deep Rebel for an additional
$100.

kp



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