> I have a theoretical question (e.g. I'm not going to implement this!)...If I
> had £60k to spend on making a machine to devote to cracking ECDL - what
> would be the best hardware to buy for price/performance?
Assuming you really meant 60 thousand UK pounds, which is respectable,
I would probably spend 25% of that on a big bunch of FPGAs, and the
remaining 75% to hire a really smart FPGA programmer. My feeling is
that the ECDL algorithms are well suited to FPGA implementation, and
that amazing performances could be achieved this way. (I'm not an
FPGA expert, though.)
But you were probably thinking of more conventional hardware.
> My initial thoughts were:
> Dual Celeron 500 w/64 Mb of RAM.
> But I'm not sure if the recent Celerons supports MMX?
They do, and you're right that a cheap dual Pentium/Celeron system
probably has the best price/performance ratio (e.g. 300-350 K
iterations per second for 1000-1500 euros).
A 600 Mhz 21264 Alpha delivers about 400 K iterations/sec, but would
be a lot more expensive, even if you buy from an assembler rather than
from Compaq.
With the Altivec-enhanced client that is in preparation, PowerMacs G4
could also be an alternative. The author of the client reported
speeds of 240 K for a 400 Mhz G4. However, those machines are more
expensive than a dual Celeron system.
> Has anyone done a price/performance comparison of the various platforms?
For the "performance" part, see
http://cristal.inria.fr/~xleroy/ecdl/speed.html
For the "price" part, I'm afraid you'll have to check street prices
yourself.
Cheers,
- Xavier Leroy
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