A computer using only 44 dual-core AMD Opteron 64-bit chips would equal IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in chess performance, using off-the-shelf parts from AMD and affiliated vendors.

In the 1997 match, if Gary Kasparov’s chess rating had been 2900 rather than 2820, it would have taken IBM at least another two years to develop a computer that could beat him. It would have required calculating nearly 1 billion positions per second to reach the chess rating of 2900, since the number of possible chess positions expands exponentially in a tree of possible positions.

Considering that, Deep Blue ultimately represents a brute force approach to the problem of making computers play chess. Calculating all possible moves for 10 moves, for example, involves roughly 10 trillion possible positions. It’s no wonder that IBM denied Kasparov a rematch because if Deep Blue had lost IBM would have to have invested substantially more money to win the next match.