The ongoing battle between a CPU and a GPU for computing supremacy isn't showing any signs of relief - in fact, real applications are only started to appear. We've been covering ElcomSoft for some time now, and it is impressive to see that intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies around the world rely on GPU technology.
This is also the reason why Intel is spending three billion dollars on Larrabee. If the company continues to make CPUs only, stream applications such as password cracking will switch to GPU completely, and no more spending dozens of millions on CPU-focused servers.
After Intelligence/Counter-Intelligence agencies move to more advanced code, ElcomSoft moves the technology to the realm of us, consumers.
And what they rolled out today is really impressive. By using a single GeForce GTX285 card, Distributed Password Recovery is 15 times faster when compared to the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, a reference CPU of choice for numerous software vendors. GeForce GTX295 will crunch 40,000 passwords But the buck didn't stopped there: by using a computer equipped with four GeForce GTX295 GPUs, PGP Disk Password Recovery returned 160,000 128-bit PGP passwords, some 200 times more than a quad-core CPU. A single GeForce GTX295 will crunch 40,000 PGP passwords in a single second, e.g. 30 times faster than Core 2 Q6600. You can check interesting comparison on the official PGP Disk Password Recovery page.
All in all, it looks like CUDA works like a charm in case of ElcomSoft. And if distributed password recovery servers operate on CUDA software, there is a pretty good idea who is buying all those Tesla SuperComputers and servers.
