Author: John Coffey
Date: 22:33:10 03/03/00
Go up one level in this thread
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. 10 years ago we had 68000 dedicated units that were master strength. My understanding is that hardware is very cheap now. (In fact there are alternatives that are cheaper and better.) So why can't we see a master strength unit for less than $100? On a related subject: The Gameboy Advanced due out in about a year will have a 30mhz ARM RISC processor. Although this is not the same as a Pentium-III, it should have no problem producing master level chess if someone wants to write a program for it. John Coffey
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.