A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security apparently wrote:
Have good reason to believe your estimate for a purpose built machine this year (expect 600,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 kps per sieve - these will not be cheap chips but will be commecially available). Expect 400 arrays would be required to do DES in a day (average) but is a lot more achievable than the 65k postulated by the gang of nine.
I received a nice flyer in the mail the other day from "Chip Express" (www.chipexpress.com, 800-95-CHIPX). They are offering Laser Programmed Gate Arrays. It appears to be a reasonable way to get some Wiener chips built. As I recall, the Wiener design required about 23,000 gates. Their blurb had the following table in in: FPGA Gates ASIC Gates 500 Units 1000 Units 5000 Units 40,000 20,000 $77 $45 $10 Not Avail 200,000 $176 $150 $82 So it appears that you can get 5000 Wiener key search chips build for about $50K. I'm not sure about the speed, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could clock these at 50 MHz. The Wiener design is pipelined and searches one key per clock, so each chip could search 50e6 keys / second. 50e6 * 5000 = 250e9 keys / second for $50K Happy Hunting... Eric