on FPGAs vs ASICs

[Bill Stewart]

At 11:11 AM 3/19/2005, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>  ---useful if you can't afford an ASIC run (a million bucks a mask...)

...
>For someone making 10,000 routers, you use FPGAs.
>
>DESCrack was solving a problem for which the x86 is not very efficient
>at computing --all the sub-byte bit-diddling--
>and hardware is very efficient (by design in DES, after all).

EFF's DESCrack cost $200K in 1998 and used ASICs.
(It's really only six years since we killed off single-DES!)
There were 1500 DES-cracker ASIC chips in it.

ASICs may cost a bit more today - Moore's Law helps,
but it also means that chip designs can become
larger and more complex, though code-cracker applications
have a lot of uniformity in their design,
and we've got six more years of experience
building ASIC cell libraries that can be reused.
I suspect a similar-sized machine would cost a similar amount
but have a lot more DES functional units in it.

FPGAs probably make more sense for routers,
because you want the ability to change the firmware more often,
and a router has a bunch of other parts as well,
and realistically, cypher-cracking is not an
economically viable activity for most people,
so the cost-benefit tradeoffs are a bit twisted.