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Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

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fortran77·

I'm surprised that from 1998 to 2020 they only got ~ 10x improvement in speed.

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You lose ~10x going from ASIC to FPGA but FPGAs probably got 100x better which nets only 10x overall improvement.

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

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

$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.

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

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.

Especially when you consider a state of the art processor in 1998 was doing < 1,000 MIPS and state of the art processor now can do > 1,000,000.

Per dollar? Or per watt?

It's only 25x per dollar (initial investment; not running costs):

> 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

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