3 ms·
The hyperscalers all have lots of idle compute, I'm not sure how many cores they have, but I believe the big three cloud services operate on the order of millio
by AaronFriel 7y ago
The hyperscalers all have lots of idle compute, I'm not sure how many cores they have, but I believe the big three cloud services operate on the order of millions of servers, most of which have tens of cores now. If a 1024 bit key is proportionally more complex to solve, it seems they could solve it with idle compute.
I don't think any of them would want the negative publicity that could arise.
- schoen 7y agoSurely it's at least a different power bill on modern hardware depending on what the hardware is computing, right?
- estomagordo 7y agoUnless I'm dumb, the 2.25 increased hardness from 768 bits to 795 bits would suggest a 2.25^(1/(795 - 768)) hardness increase per bit. That is roughly 1.0305. Taking 1.0305^(1024-795) yields something like a 970-fold increase.
- Dylan16807 7y agoA thousandfold increase is in the right range. But this factorization only took a thousand core years. Millions of servers averaging one donated core each can hit a thousand thousand core years in a few weeks.
- eru 7y agoGoogle doesn't have any truly idle compute. They can turn off their unused computing power to save on electricity. And they have internal tasks that they can throw arbitrary left over computing power at to get slight benefits. (Don't remember how much I am allowed to say about those. But it includes the kind of tasks you can come up with after brainstorming for about two minutes.) So breaking 1024-bit RSA would need to compete with those uses, not with true idling.