It's very probable that they have and if so, it's almost certain that it would i... | Hacker News

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		plaguuuuuu on Dec 10, 2012 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: 25-GPU cluster cracks every standard Windows passw... It's very probable that they have and if so, it's almost certain that it would involve specialized hardware implementations (ASIC, FPGA, whatever) rather than commodity graphics hardware which is burdened with expensive and useless stuff like onboard memory and would be power inefficient considering that the entire purpose of NSA in the first place is to provide SIGINT and encrypt or decrypt signals, it's almost a given that they're trying to the best of their ability to crack stuff.

raverbashing on Dec 10, 2012 [–]

Not sure

Money buys more commodity hardware faster than the time/money used to develop a chip

It's not hard to make tens, or maybe even hundreds of GPUs beat a specialized chip except for very specific things

And even for something specialized it's probably easier to use an FPGA

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