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A comment on 1Password GPU brute-force with 3M hash/s. Parent comment

Re:1Password GPU brute-force with 3M hash/s by alanctgardner2 on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @05:59PM (#5561217)
When you get into ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits), the answer to 'can it be repurposed?' is almost universally no. It's basically a purpose built circuit, built into a single package. This is cheap and fast, because you only put in the parts you need, but there's non-trivial engineering effort to design them.

I think initially some miners used FPGAs: these are reprogrammable and offer similar performance, but they're much more expensive.

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Re:1Password GPU brute-force with 3M hash/s by quinndupont on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @06:14PM (#5561284)
I think ajross is (mostly) right, ASICs can be re-purposed for SHA256 calculations. To what extent they have baked in a whole round of SHA256 is a good question, they may just be developed around very parallel XORs (which is why some GPUs are faster at BTC mining than others—they have built in XOR logic).

I do believe seeing that (the mythical) Butterfly Labs intends on releasing software for all sorts of other parallel high-performance applications (or some kind of driver/API type of thing), but I could be hallucinating.

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Re:1Password GPU brute-force with 3M hash/s by sliverstorm on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @06:16PM (#5561301)
I think ajross is (mostly) right, ASICs can be re-purposed for SHA256 calculations.

I know what you mean, but I think you should be more specific in your statement. Bitcoin mining ASICs might be re-purposable. Not all ASICs.

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Re:1Password GPU brute-force with 3M hash/s by quinndupont on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @06:18PM (#5561316)
Good point. An ASIC could be completely non-repurposable. The commonly-available (soon) BTC ASICS should be damn good at SHA256 cracking, maybe other XOR-related applications too.
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Re:1Password GPU brute-force with 3M hash/s by sliverstorm on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @06:15PM (#5561295)
Re: FPGAs, don't forget their other major downfall for mining- power. An equivalent ASIC uses much less power.
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