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Are there any significant speed up in time on cracking an RSA key (either brute-force or factoring with general number field sieve) using a GPA or FPGA compared to a CPU? If there is a speed advantage, are there any figures on how much it is?

Jens Erat
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user78228
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    The question is odd, as in easy why ask it. I think that's why people are confused. A single 4u server with a FPGA back plane can replace an entire datacenter of CPU's. Somewhere around 10,000 - 1. Start looking at openCL and the password haze project. That combined with clustered resources is just plain win. – Christopher Apr 12 '16 at 11:34
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    So... you're asking to provide figures about speed-gain, but are not willing to provide any info on either hardware or software? In general: tasks that can be executed in parallel are usually faster on a GPU than a CPU, due to the higher number of cores. So yes, there's a speed advantage - most likely. For the rest of the question: good luck in getting any answer with the info you provided. – Paul Apr 12 '16 at 13:13

2 Answers2

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FPGAs are not like CPUs or GPUs, and cannot be compared like that. Your question lacks sufficient details to provide a meaningful answer. FPGAs come in wildly different sizes and offers paralellism only limited by the logic resources of the FPGA. A giant €100000 FPGA will have way way more logic resources than a €1 FPGA. There are no €100000 GPUs or CPUs.

You must include other metrics to make a meaningful performance comparison. Like investment cost, power usage, implementation effort, and so on.

If you want a hint of high end FPGA capability: Some of largest FPGAs available can do up to 5-10 trillion multiplications per second.

Timmy Brolin
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I believe there are too many variables here to give a precise answer. It depends on the below, as far as I know:

  1. the cracking software and/or the algorithm used
  2. the number of cores in the GPU
  3. the architecture of the GPU
  4. the architecture of the CPU
  5. no of bits in the RSA key
forest
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JOW
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    Point 1 and 5 is irrelevant. And I'm not asking for a precise answer, just a rough figure so that there's something to start with, which means point 2 to 4 is also irrelevant. I wish I can downvote this answer. – user78228 Jun 09 '15 at 10:35
  • are you looking for benchmarks here? – JOW Jun 09 '15 at 10:51
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    I'm sure I'm clear with the question about what I'm looking for. And regardless of whether the figure is a benchmark or something else, your answer is still irrelevant becuase any comparisons are _supposed_ to be using the same algorithm with the same number of bits, otherwise it's like comparing apple to oranges and the whole thing becomes pointless. And if you aren't accounting for the points 2 to 4 when interpretating the figures, it's also pointless. They are the requisites for any figures, so when I said that I already mean that they are accounted for. – user78228 Jun 09 '15 at 11:24
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    yeah, now i see that my answer is irrelevant, good luck finding one. – JOW Jun 09 '15 at 11:44