When will SP computers become obsolete

[bigo]

I just bought a single processor computer mostly for chess, will there ever come a time when i can't use it, it's 1.6 centrino processor.

[nczempin]

I just bought a single processor computer mostly for chess, will there ever come a time when i can't use it, it's 1.6 centrino processor.

There will come a time when you can't use it, but it will have nothing to do with the fact that it's a single processor computer.

There will come a time when it will have outlived its usefulness in that you could get more for it as a collector's item than you would have to pay for a more powerful computer.

There will also come a time when it will be so outdated that if anything breaks, you won't get any more replacements for it.

But the above has nothing to do with it being an SP machine.

And now to the question you were really asking:

Even if all the engines in the world will become MP (and they won't all, after all there are still the versions that are around today, why should they disappear?), so that you would have to run an MP engine on an SP machine, you would merely get some overhead, i. e. the same engine's SP version, if it existed, would run slightly faster on an SP machine than the MP version on the same SP machine.

And, given that it is possible to check how many processors a machine has, if the one-processor case is taken care of explicitly, the difference should be negligible.

[Dann Corbit]

I just bought a single processor computer mostly for chess, will there ever come a time when i can't use it, it's 1.6 centrino processor.

The technology (SP, MP, whatever) is irrelevant. What is relevant is age. Computer technology advances exponentially over time.
So in 5 years, a computer is worth close to nothing.

So every five years you will have to get a new computer or use one that is 1/(2^5) as strong as the new ones.

That's 3% (give or take some constant factor) as strong as the competition.

If you wait ten years it is .001 = 1/10th of 1%. Ouch.

But cheer up, some people think that Moore's law will eventually run completely out of steam.

I think that another technology will be invented when that happens (just like it always has in the past).

But if I am right, that means that ten years from now your computer will be 1000 times as powerful as it is today for the same cost. So either way, we win.