[Hardware] "success"

[John L. Bass]

Dan Oetting wrote:

>Now, if you want a scary number, find the power requirement of this  
>chip running at that clock speed. Then compute the required run time  
>to crack RC5-72 on the device. And finally, multiply the product of  
>those by the cost of electricity in your area.
>
>-- Dan O.
>  
>

And there remains the environmentally correct question, of should we 
even be doing this, and the cost generates almost no value for society.

I do think we should be doing DNet projects, but ones that we contract 
with industry for prizes, where the results are benefiting man kind. 
FPGA's are certainly valuable for many of these applications as enablers 
that allow HPC computing at a fraction of the cost of traditional HPC 
facilities.

I certainly do not think that it's environmentally correct to keep power 
to most OLDER desktop machines simply to be a stat whore. Or even run 
RSA DNet clients on machines that would be "idle" otherwise, since most 
modern CPU's consume power directly proportional to computational load 
... a relatively small idle power, and a huge 100% utilized power.

With the planet nearing peak oil, and huge social costs (war and 
increased cost of living) over natural resources in scarce supply, 
conserving electrical energy is just as important as conserving 
transportation fuel (since electricity is also becoming a transportation 
fuel even in wind/solar/hydro generation zones).