25 times faster than Deep Blue

I bought my first parallel computing device, a 2-week old XFX GeForce 8800GT, at $200 SGD last night. It worked fine with my ASUS PL5 1394 mainboard.



8800GT Specification
Released on 29 Oct 2007
Code name G92
65nm fabrication
600 MHz core clock
112 stream processors
1500 MHz clock
512 MB GDDR3
256 bit bus width
138 watts
754 million transistors
Theoretically 504 GFLOPS

Minus 512 MB memory and other external stuffs, I guest each stream processor cost $1 SDG :)
Let say on average, we can only utilize 60% of max computing power (inefficient algorithms, mem access delay, synchronization delay ...), so the power of my device is about 302 GFLOPS. Then performance /cost ratio = 2.2 GFLOPS per watt. I just bought a very good performance / cost ratio computing device. Compare to IBM's Deep Blue, the computer defeated Kasparov in 1997. My device is equal to 25 deep blues combined together. I think I will do weather forcast for Singapore (just kidding :)

Reference:

1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Gary Kasparov. Its price has been estimated at 5 million dollars, and it produced 11.38 Gflops of measured performance, making its PPR more than $439,367/Gflop.
http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/PPR/