Again, this entire article and discussion is about state-of-the-art chess. As in, literally working to "solve" the game and develop optimal strategy. I don't understand what relevance casual mobile chess games have. Computer chess is already very far beyond human capabilities, and it can't be pressed further just using mobile phone hardware (nor is that a reasonable restriction).

It'd be like in a discussion about SpaceX's BFR designs to colonize Mars, someone comes in and questions why they're using retropropulsion since the requisite control systems are infeasibly expensive for amateur model rockets. It's a completely different discussion.

That's not why this is relevant. Given equivalent hardware it's still a worse solution for chess. The value is you can get results of similar quality with vastly more compute power even without 1,000+ years of analysis.

Otherwise the only takeaway is this failed to improve the state of the art.

"Equivalent hardware" is only relevant if we're talking about cost. When measured by that metric, the TPUs are indeed superior. Raw operations is an irrelevant metric given the existence of economic purpose-specific hardware that can perform a lot more of the operations required for matrix multiplication than for general computation. GPUs work exactly the same.

Again, cost is relative to hardware you have. If you own a supercomputer already and you want to run chess on it for whatever reason it matters what the performance you get from each algorithm on that hardware. If your going to buy new hardware it's design depends on performance across every algorithm you expect to use.

So, the only case where chess performance per $ matters is if you are only going to ever use that hardware to run chess. In every other case which is the vast majority of the time you care about diffent metrics.