Best OS/CPU for cracking?

[bigjon]

Since RC5 cracking is integer intensive (no floating ops), am I right in thinking it wouldn't matter too much whether I use AMD or Intel? I don't have any Cyrix CPUs, but how would they stack up?

Same goes for OS - I've heard Linux is by far the best, but by how much? I have a few Win98se computers and an NT4 computer I'm running the RC5 client on at home. Heck, how bout DOS? I have a few old Pentiums and an AMD 120mhz puter I could always fire up

 

[NakaNaka]

Paulson why is it that a 450 mhz Mac woops a 1ghz TBird for Cracking??

 

[Engineer]

bigjon,

You mean you have perfectly good hardware NOT cracking?!? :Q


Shame man!



(hehe!)

 

[bigjon]

Sorry, Paulson, Macs are outta the question "RC5 Mac" just sounds like an oxymoron to me. I guess that's because of my anti-mac problem.

I thought you just had a 998Mhz Athlon Sorry, I couldn't resist My Celery 300a@450 is doing about 1.25MKeys/sec so that makes AMD look pretty good - your 3.49MK divided by my 1.25MK means your 1Ghz is putting out 2.8x more keys even though it's "only" 2.22x faster (cache helping out here maybe?).

 

[KarsinTheHutt]

as far as x87 FPU...

1. AMD
2. Intel
3. Via/Cyrix (Trailing AMD and Intel by a significant margin)

If RC5 cracking took advantage of SSE, I think Intel/AMD would be pretty evenly matched. Otherwise, the K7 FPU gives P6 a big whack.

My P3 450 Katmai does about 1.23 MKeys/sec... damn off die L2 Cache

 

[bigjon]

Engineer,

I'm working on it

 

[BurntKooshie]

RC5 uses NO floating point code WHATSOEVER. FPU power has no impact on RC5. The reason why is because of altivec. Its a 128 bit wide implementation, and it can be "bitsliced" (I don't understand the term perfectly, but it means that the instructions can be broken up better), and therfore, can be much, much faster (over twice as fast per mhz as an Athlon).

I've read that Linux was marginally faster than win2000, which is fater than win95, which is faster than win98.

RC5 is highly dependant upon the "ROL" instruction at this point, because of the algorithm used.

 

[Napalm381]

bigjon- it looks like you need to take a peek at the Distributed Computing Speed Calculation Page. It tells you the "multiplier" to find out how many kkeys your type of proc will do. It also allows you to input your mhz for each type of proc and it tells you how many blocks you can do a day.

 

[Mandrill]

DOS runs very well. I am currently sneakering with a Dos node until I can get a nic for it. fire all of them up Bigjon. every block counts

 

[bigjon]

OK, here goes....(lights go dim)....

Actually, I'll do it tonight. Right now I've got 4 Pentiums (166-200) that don't have hard drives in them I was going to sell them cheap to anyone that could take them off my hands, but now.......

 

[divide by zero]

Bigjon, sounds like a case for Klinux!

Klinux -> dnet client + linux on a boot floppy!

 

[bigjon]

Cool, I was actually looking for something like Klinux. My problem is that I'm not very Linux savvy, but I'm pretty fluent with dos.

I'm pretty sure that RC5 on either DOS or Linux will beat any GUI based system (that would be my guess anyway), but how do DOS and Linux compare to each other?

It wouldn't be hard to make a DOS diskette with the DOS client...