GPU password cracking.

GPU acceleration has been used to crack passwords for some time now. This is due to GPU's parallel layout, which is a hip better at large-scale mathematical operations compared to ordinary CPU’s. Before, there was only nVidia with its CUDA SDK. I must admit that while I was building the lab and doing lots of administrative work, I totally missed the arrival of AMD’s Stream SDK. It appears that ATI Radeon cards are much faster at crunching the numbers, in some cases x 10 times and software developers are quickly adding support for ATI cards. I just discovered a nice blog on password cracking by Vladimir Katalov from ElcomSoft. The blog is very informative and a good read. The author  mentioned that a new version of Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker for example already supports both nVidia and ATI cards achieving speeds  around "7,000 passwords per second on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580, and about 20,000 passwords per second on ATI Radeon HD 5970".