Son of Deep Blue Arrives

RS/6000 SP, the upgrade to Deep Blue, ups calculation count from 200 million moves per second to 1 billion.

IBM%squots new RS/6000 SP would give Russian chess master Gary Kasparov an even bigger headache than he probably had last year when he lost his famous match with the massively parallel machine dubbed Deep Blue.

The RS/6000 SP, due this week, is the upgrade to Deep Blue, and IBM has increased the computer%squots calculation-crunching potential, in chess terms, from 200 million moves per second to 1 billion.

The improvement is mainly due to the 332-MHz chips that are now in the system, according to IBM. Since it isn%squott likely that paying customers will install the Deep Blue program just to play chess with the computer--which carries an average price tag of $1 million--targeted applications include electronic business, business intelligence, server consolidation, computer-aided design, and scientific analysis.

Users ordering the computer with a single chip pay only $150,000, but the machine%squots real advantage is its ability to do parallel processing, that is, to compute using multiple processors simultaneously.

The RS/6000 SP competes with machines from companies such as Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

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