Eugen Leitl and Stephan Somogyi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote about the Skein hash function announcement.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/10/the_skein_hash.html?1
> http://www.schneier.com/skein.html
One thing I noticed on a first read-through was a discussion of speed for ASICs vs. general CPUs. Their implementation on CPUs was about 4 Gbps/core, and their estimate of ASIC speed was about 5 Gbps using about 80K gates worth of ASIC, and their hash-tree mode makes parallelization efficient. Their conclusion was that ASICs don't give you much of a speedup, but may save power or cost. A quick google-look at ASICs showed a number in the range of 300K-20M gates, so hash-trees could probably get speedups of up to 20-100x if you can keep from becoming input-speed-bound. The 300K chips were about $6, 5M at $50 and 350MHz, which is somewhat faster than the Skein team estimate, and some of the denser chips didn't mention price but were starting to use 45nm technology. So if Skein becomes popular, ASIC accelerator hardware may be practical for higher-speed applications. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
