On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Douglas Eadline wrote:
Vincent,
I fear I have fallen into a "vincent-hole" in which there exists
a point at which a discussion-horizon is crossed
and my ability to understand what you are talking
about ceases to exist. For me, after crossing this threshold
the point of the discussion is lost and I enter a state
of maximum entropy.
If by this you mean it is time for this thread to DIE DIE DIE then I
agree heartily.
Chess is arguably HPC and arguably interesting as a class of
particularly difficult parallel problem, but it is also definitely not
mainstream HPC.
rgb
Right now the big games (other than chess) sell 3-5 million copies a year
(50-100 euro a product),
and compared to that chess is very tiny. Chessmaster still claims 4
million
unit sales, but that's over
a number of years, not within 1 year.
So in that sense releasing a chessproduct is commercially not so
interesting.
Creating some new game, making a lot of bla bla around it and hope to get
one of the games that sell 3-5 million copies a year, is far more
interesting.
If you compare that with hardware, then those manufacturers still rip off
people. That new quad
core2 chip is going to release at 999 euro next month and of course is
very
fast.
But just look to the huge price of it as compared to software games.
Vincent
----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Eadline" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Vincent Diepeveen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Geoff Jacobs" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Angel Dimitrov"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <beowulf@beowulf.org>; "Jim Lux"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Robert G. Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 9:44 PM
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] commercial clusters
Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
-- snip --
Well the hard facts is that hundreds of thousands of $3000-$20k
chesscomputers (dedicated with a 10Mhz chip) have been sold until the
pc
was
faster than the dedicated chesscomputers. A vaste multiple indeed of
that
of
$50-$1000 computers has been sold at the time.
Are you saying: At least 100,000 chess computers were sold for an
average of $6000 (US) for a total of $600,000,000 before the PC was
introduced. Almost a billion dollar chess computer market segment.
You are right, that is a hard fact to believe.
--
Doug
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--
Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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