A smothered mate in chess is a checkmate by a knight in which the opposing king cannot move out of check because he is blocked in by his own pieces. This is the feeling I get today when I think about computers and chess. Computers are smothering the humans - they are clearly superior players.
When Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in 1997, it could calculate 200,000,000 chess positions per second. From 1985 to 1997, its calculations more than doubled every year. Its chess rating went up by 100 points every two years. If the project would have continued, one can assume that Deep Blue would now have a rating of around 3300, or about 500 more rating points than the best human players in the world. A 500 rating point difference means that Deep Blue would beat the best players in the world 96% of the time.
Now, after a decade in which processing speeds have increased an astounding 20 million times, a PC can achieve what Deep Blue did nine years ago. Deep Blitz was created using only 44 dual-core AMD Opteron 64-bit chips with Deep Fritz software. Check out the complete specs here.

What is most impressive about the Deep Blitz machine's results is not how quickly x86-compatible microprocessors are catching up to the big iron, but rather how powerful Deep Blue was nine years ago. Forty-four dual-core Opteron 275 chips add up to a staggering 10.25 billion transistors. The fact that roughly 10 times the number of transistors is needed to equal Deep Blue's performance is a testament to the genius of Hsu and the Deep Blue team.

via KurzweilAI.net