Grandmaster John Nunn has constructed his own chess computer based on two 2.8 GHz Xeon processors.

“One of the problems with currently available processors is that they are not particularly well suited to the integer calculations used for chess,” he said. “A Pentium 4 will be slower at chess than a Pentium 3 of an equivalent clock speed.” So although he switched from a dual-processor 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 machine to a dual-processor 2.8 GHz Xeon machine, the new computer wasn’t 2.2 times as fast, only 1.7 times as fast at chess.