Salted SHAx passwords are basically the entire reason GPU John The Ripper and oclHashcat exist, although SHA2-512 is significantly slower than SHA2-256, so if you're going to use a terrible SHA-based password hash, SHA2-512 is your best bet.

SHA512 is slower on most (all?) current GPUs, but there is plenty of hardware on which it is faster than SHA256.

Hm. Example?

It'll (theoretically) be faster on any hardware that supports 64 bit operations, as SHA512 ends up doing fewer block operations.

This assumes you're hashing something at least 8 bytes long, and that your hash implementation is smart enough to use the 64 bit capabilities of your platform.

Yep, in the french version of the message they specify that it's salted.

http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=8998