[Hardware] The market of ASICs (One GigaKey / Second?)

[Michael Meeuwisse]

The RC5 algorithm is quite easy to translate to a pipeline, which, as every 
other pipeline on the planet, can push out a key check every clock cycle. 
With today's technologies (i hope) i'm not underestimating things when i say 
that one Gigakey every second (that's not a typo, that's what... 1.5block 
every second? ) is possible.

But then there's something called math. (Technical stuff lower, skip if not 
interested)

The expanded key table is S[T-1] long, T depends on R (2*(R+1) to be exact), 
R is usually 12. That makes S quite big. And because we wanted this in a 
pipeline (my estimations: about 600 stages) it sums up at S[25..0] + say... 
4 extra vars (think L, think current key), times 32 bits, times 600 stages, 
divided by 8 for bytes, that makes 72KiB. Not that much, right?
Then there is bandwith to that small amount of memory. Every stage we need 
to read and write a lot to this. I'm not going to lay it out to you (and 
some people might want to argue this number: feel free) but my calculations 
resulted in numbers around 240 Gigabyte every second. And that's DDR'ed. And 
no, don't think that bursting numbers will get it much lower. And don't even 
start about managing this amount of bandwith required. Fact: it's impossible 
for external memory, internal memory (in FPGA's, or other candy) isn't even 
an argument.

Thus, that puts us in the position where FPGA's are not an option and 
mainstream number crunchers don't compete. Is one gigakey / second an 
illusion? No. It's possible, but at a price.
ASIC's _have_ the possibility to actually do this kind of work. The 
disadvantage? Custom made masks for the production of these ASICs cost about 
a million a piece. If you're lucky, and if you're first design works.

Now for the economic side :)
*Say* I have one million dollars. *Say* I think there's a market for these 
little giants. And that I'm getting about 250 (is that overestimated? don't 
have a clue actually) chips of one wafer, and I'm selling them at 100 bucks 
a piece (you guys see how you interface it to your pc for now). After 40 
wafers, I'm break-even. After that, it's all going to make me rich before I 
turn 20. :)

40 wafers. Say 50. 12.500 chips. At 100 bucks a piece. Is there a market for 
this? Do people actually want to spend one hundred dollars for a chip that's 
going to give them higher stats and a change for 'la grande' price of 1000 
bucks?
Btw, I do find it sad to see that the projects 'against [something]', which 
have a higher change of getting funded by people use obfuscated algorithms 
(and floating point stuff iirc), making thinking of these kind of 
implementations impossible. But that's offtopic. :)

Would you spend 100 bucks on a chip that's only giving you higher stats? 
Would you do it when you know you're helping developing medicine for, say, 
cancer?

Would love to see a reply to this,

cheers, wacco

Ps: for stats: hell no. Cancer: yup. I think i would.

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