The IBM Deep Blue supercomputer that defeated World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in the 1997 historic match had 480 custom chess chips in the system. Each of these chess chips contains one of the most sophisticated chess evaluation functions ever designed, whether in hardware or in software. On a general-purpose computer, the computation performed by the chess chip for one chess position is estimated to require up to 40,000 general-purpose instructions. At 2 to 2.5 million chess positions per second, one chess chip is equivalent to a 100 billion instructions/sec supercomputer. For playing chess, Deep Blue was comparable to a general-purpose supercomputer with processing speed of up to 40 Tera operations/sec. This article describes the design philosophy, the general architecture, and the performance of the chess chips which were the main source of Deep Blue's computation power.