AMD revealed that its plans a 12-core Opteron processor in 2010, and a 16-core Opteron in 2011. Unfortunately, almost no further/technical details — more cores is definitely good, but we’d like to see whether AMD is able to implement SSE2 effectively. Right now, SSE2 instructions are executed much slower on AMD processors than on Intel ones, while they’re really important for SHA-1 (the most password checking routines are based on). Or may be SSE5 will give provide additional benefits for password cracking?

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.

From F-Secure advises against using Adobe Reader article:

The key findings of the survey of the 35860 wireless networks (in 12 Indian cities) are:

According to Tweak Down, AMD will start shipping them next month. We’ll see how do they compare with Intel Gulftown.

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.

New member of Core i7 family: six cores, hyper-threading, and some new instructions — including ones for AES encryption. Unfortunately, useless for our password-cracking purposes: most password-checking routines are based on SHA-1. But anyway, an ability to run 12 threads at a time will definitely increase the performance. We’ll see (in Q1’2010). More info at Tom’s Hardware.

According to The Inquirer, Nvidia GT300 promised in October. Should be a good video card for GPU-accelerated password cracking :).

If you have no idea what E-Discovery is, read Crossing the E-Discovery Border: IT and Legal. But if you do, I’d recommend attending this webinar anyway 🙂