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.

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?

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 :).

No, it’s no a typo :). COFEE means Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, actually. Never heard about it? Then read Microsoft supplies Interpol with DIY forensics tool. Just don’t ask where to get it. We have not seen it either.

Google made a video tour inside their premises. Looks like an amazing wire-n-hardware gathering: