Intel recently announced that they had developed a research prototype processor that can perform calculations at the rate of more than one trillion floating point operations per second. While consuming about the same amount of power as a light bulb!

That's a lot of calculation horsepower. The prototype is an 80 core chip about the size of human fingernail. The last attempt to attain this speed was in 1996 when the ASCI Red computer benchmarked a calculation rate of one teraflop. ASCI was a system that used 10,000 Pentium Pro processors and consumed 500kW of power and another 500kW of power to cool the room it was in!

The Intel press release and related information is available here and contains a lot of interesting information including the prediction that this type of computing horsepower may well be available on our desktops within a decade.

Which makes me boggle, and scares me a little. With advances like this in sheer brute force computing power cracking encryption keys will become much easier! We were more or less safe from brute force attacks against encryption keys and hashes because the computing horsepower required to crack them was impractical to assemble.

But with chips like these available, I sure hope the Crypto folks are thinking about a whole new approach! Don't misunderstand, I think the benefits of this breakthrough are potentially amazing, but all technology can and has been used for both good and evil.  And this is the equivalent of the digital nuclear bomb!

Well, as someone once said, you cannot put the genie back in the bottle!

Cheers,

Robert Porter