----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Howe"
Indeed so. however, the argument "in 1998, a FPGA machine broke a DES key in 72 hours, therefore TODAY..." assumes that (a) the problems are comparable, and (b) that moores law has been applied to FPGAs as well as CPUs.
That is only misreading my statements and missing a very large portion where I specifically stated that the new machine would need to be custom instead of semi-custom. The proposed system was not based on FPGAs, instead it would need to be based on ASICs engineered using modern technology, much more along the lines of a DSP. The primary gains available are actually from the larger wafers in use now, along with the transistor shrinkage. Combined these have approximately kept the cost in line with Moore's law, and the benefits of custom engineering account for the rest. So for exact details about how I did the calculations I assumed Moore's law for speed, and an additional 4x improvement from custom chips instead of of the shelf. In order to verify the calculations I also redid them assuming DSPs which should be capable of processing the data (specifically from TI), I came to a cost within a couple orders of magnitude although the power consumption would be substantially higher. Joe