Hardware acceleration of password recovery has been a hot topic for quite some time already. We were the first to adopt widely available graphic cards for this purpose and we’re proud of this. Today I’d like to share some thoughts on hardware acceleration for password recovery, its past, present, and future. I will also cover the most frequently asked questions regarding GPUs.

First of all, sad news: Intel Larrabee is delayed till 2010 (we were expecting it in Q4’2009), according to the reports. With 32 cores onboard (though this number is not confirmed yet), it looks like a very good system for password cracking. Some Larrabee development tools and resources are already available, and of course, we’re porting our code to this platform, and will share the results with you as soon as we’ll be able to (we’re under the NDA with Intel; as well as with Nvidia and AMD :)).

We wrote about Cost-effective video cards recently, but what about better ones, if the prise does not really matter? Just read Best Of The Best: High-End Graphics Card Roundup at Tom’s Hardware. Large. Expensive. Power-consuming. But really fast — so best choice if you deal with GPU acceleration.

Tom’s Hardware has tested two mainstream NVIDIA cards (GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 9800 GTX) on several CUDA-enabled applications. The applications were:

If you are going to purchase a new computer (or make it yourself), you should definitely think about graphics — for CAD/CAM, gaming, searching for extraterrestrial intelligence at home or password cracking. Of course, thinking of budget, too. I hope you’re already aware of NVIDIA SLI which allows to use multiple video cards, but how a single dual-GPU compares to two single-GPU ones? Read GeForce GTX 295 Vs. GTX 275 SLI: When Two Are Better Than One.

Considering Intel Core i7? Read Nvidia Says Core i7 Isn’t Worth It and nVidia calls Core i7 a waste of money first. We’d agree that investing into GPU(s) is really a good idea, especially if you need to crack passwords.

17" screen, Intel Core 2 Extreme processor (four cores) plus NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M — an excellent device not only for gaming, but also for wardriving. Get it from Sager, and just add Wireless Security Auditor.

Finally, nVidia’s GT300 specifications revealed! 512 cores (remember that GT200 has only 240), which means about 3 TFLOPS — can you imagine that? We’re also expecting the new generation of Tesla supercomputers based on those GPUs. GT300 also gives direct hardware access for CUDA 3.0, DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1 and OpenCL.

Can you imagine 10,080 processing cores? And how about 40 TFlops? Thanks to NVIDIA Tesla — this is 42 C1060 cards only.

Nvidia has announced that it will now offer Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 for Apple Mac Pro systems. Good idea! More on CNET.