alt Hacker NewsI think the author jumps around a bit in the piece muddying the facts. A 200 MHz Intel Pentium Pro he's talking about had a single core and a supported single thread, so while this may be true of a modern x64 computer:
>Chess engines like Stockfish, running on silicon instead of our human brains, dominate us at the first of these and analyze millions of positions per second.
the 200MHz Pentium Pro he's talking about was capable of 1.5 million instructions per second, which on it's own is not quite millions, and how many instructions would be required to evaluate a position, let's say very optimistically it's 10 for "valid move", now we're at 150k positions per optimistic second.
That's off by an order of magnitude.
200Mhz PPro can theoretically execute 600 MIPS (3 instructions per clock), assuming only high-throughput instructions are used and no cache misses. (the average IPC for realistic workloads is ~1.0 though)
The Pentium Pro is an out-of-order, superscalar processor (that started the lineage of modern x86 processors).