Alde’s Stuff

The folk over at Distributed.net, have been working on a preliminary client for the PS3, and since they’ve sorta semi-publicly acknowledged this (I have inside information I was sitting on), I’ll describe what they’ve gotten themselves into.

The client is currently being worked on, and have an assembly-optimized RC5-72 SPE cores that are running at approximately 24 Million Keys per Second.

Now, according to their Speed Database, an Athlon 64 4000+ gets appx 10Mkps, while a Core2Duo 2.6Ghz get appx 9.6Mkps.

Now, I’m sure you’ve read my post about PS3 datacenters, especially the point where I state they have 6 user-available SPEs. That 24 million kps is per SPE, so 6 * 24 = 144Mkps on the SPE’s alone. I’d be afraid to see what this thing will do with DES. Or for matter of fact, Triple-DES. I’ll remind you that normal Triple-DES encryption uses only 2 keys, not 3. Triple-DES encrypts the plaintext with key #1, decrypts the cryptotext with key #2, then re-encrypts that output with key #1. Therefore you can easily put the two DES keys into the 128 bit registers… Voooom….

There’s still some issues to solve, and an optimized PPE core must be written, since the current PowerPC cores on the PPE is very abysmal. Also, the client is written for PS3 Linux, and that a native PS3 port would require a PS3 dev kit that is currently unavailable to the dev team. And the lead on the project lives in a country where the PS3’s currently cost $3000 US.

So, if you’d like to donate one or know someone at Sony that could help as well, Distributed.net’s donation page is http://www.distributed.net/donation.php.

There’s no Xbox 360 client under development, well, mainly, because Microsoft doesn’t want Linux on the box (though Free60 is trying their best), so conversely, if you know someone who’d be willing to donate a Xbox360 development kit, that link above works just as well.