[Beowulf] commercial clusters

[Vincent Diepeveen]

Some manufacturers exported to 106 countries certain types of machines.
This all happened from end 70s to start 90s.

Software has total ended all that. What happens now is that some machine 
sometimes sells in 1 country a 100k units, but that's all lowend dedicated 
units.

It is no compare. Realize the huge boom of software games when PC's arrived.

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" <deadline at eadline.org>
To: "Vincent Diepeveen" <diep at xs4all.nl>
Cc: "Geoff Jacobs" <gdjacobs at gmail.com>; "Angel Dimitrov" 
<stormlaboratory at yahoo.com>; <beowulf at beowulf.org>; "Jim Lux" 
<james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov>; "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu>
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
>
>
>
>
>