On: The World’s Fastest DES Cracker

[Palomides]

going from ~2000 ASICs to ~50 FPGAs and still being much faster is pretty good imo

[tyingq → Palomides]

The Deep Crack ASICs had 25 processing units per chip, so 44,544 "cores" total for the EFF DES cracker. The crack.sh FPGA setup has 1920 "cores" (48 boards, 40 "cores" per board).

So it's 10x faster with 23x fewer cores.

[abiogenesis → Palomides]

True, but the cost hasn't changed by the same magnitude:

> In 1998 the Electronic Frontier Foundation built the EFF DES Cracker. It cost around $250,000

> The system that you're renting time on is over $100k in specialized FPGA hardware

[ARandomerDude → abiogenesis]

$250K in 1998 is $400K today, if the inflation calculator I found on Google is correct. So there's a 4X decrease in inflation adjusted cost. Not an order of magnitude, but it's something.

[hedgehog → ARandomerDude]

Those are also older FPGAs, price for the same performance today would be lower.