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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1026
'Megahetz myth' gets new proponent
By ron carlson, Insanely Great Mac
September 30th 2002
The alpha geeks behind the recently completed RC5-64 contest have numbers sure to be
of interest to the faithful
Distributed.net reported last week that the RC5-64 contest is now over and offered a
statistical round-up of the effort. Although the man in Japan credited with finding
the right key was running a flavor of Windoze, the group's press release marking the
occassion had this to say:
So, after 1,757 days and 58,747,597,657 work units tested, the winning key was
found... Ignoring artificially high numbers resulting from network difficulties, we
completed 86,950,894 workunits on our best day. This is 0.12 percent of the total
keyspace meaning that at our peak rate we could expect to exhaust the keyspace in 790
days. Our peak rate of 270,147,024 kkeys/sec is equivalent to 32,504 800MHz Apple
PowerBook G4 laptops or 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines or (to use some rc5-56
numbers) nearly a half million Pentium Pro 200s.
Yes, you read that that right -- it takes over 13,000 more 2GHz AMD processors to
equal the work-unit crunching power of "just" 32K PowerBooks!
Editor's note: To quote someone dead and still more intelligent than me, "There are
three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" -- Benjamin Disraeli.
We often rail against the so-called benchmarkers who "prove" how pokey Macs really
are. Thereupon, we should take this bit of "news" with an equally large grain of salt
(and rub it with great vigor into the gaping wound that is Windoze, snigger...)
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