Re: hardware vs. john the ripper - fun

[Matt Burnett <marukka () mac com>]

Yes the G4 (PowerPC 74XX) and G5 (PowerPC 97X) series chips have a vector
unit. A while ago I began work on a crypt(3) Altivec core but never really
finished it. And you could more or less write a core that would execute 4
crypt(3) ciphers in parallel. If you look around Apple's site
(developer.apple.com) they have plenty of developer docs on the chips. Don¹t
bother going to motorola, I ordered their free hard copy developer manuals
years ago and they never came. Although they still may offer some developer
PDFs online.

On 1/23/04 1:33 PM, "Byron Sonne" <blsonne () rogers com> wrote:

> > Are thoses specs right? Dual 1.4 g4's getting almost 17k cps? Is this right?
> > Its almost 3x a 3.2ghz p4. I It would be interesting to see what a dual g5
> > 2ghz would get if a asm core was written for it.
>
> Especially since, as I understand it, the Gx/PPC line does
> honest-to-goodness real vector processing (is that the altivec stuff?)
> whereas the x86 arch only approximates it using the MMX instruction set,
> and not as well either. Not sure what kinda hassles would be added for
> assembly and ML in order to take advantage of the Mac CPUs special
> abilities.
>
> I suppose that is why Macs are rather nicer at high end video and audio
> tasks but whether that same advantage could be applied to crypto I'm not
> sure. I would appreciate a good schooling on this, if anyone knows
> firsthand or has some good, relevant links.
>
> If I ever get rich, my next, big treat will be a dual G5 running some
> kind of free 'nix.

"The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) is the most dangerous
organization in the world."
Bill O'Reilly on Fox News during the "No Spin Zone" on January 10th 2004


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