Intel has unveiled its latest lineup of dedicated graphics cards, driven by the powerful Intel Xe architecture. The Intel Arc series showcases impressive performance, rivaling mid-range offerings from competing brands, while maintaining an exceptional price-performance ratio that outperforms NVIDIA’s counterparts. In this article, we explore the potential of Intel Arc GPUs for forensic password recovery and delve into their performance capabilities, comparing them with both Intel’s built-in graphics and mid-range NVIDIA RTX boards.

Most password protection methods rely on multiple rounds of hash iterations to slow down brute-force attacks. Even the fastest processors choke when trying to break a reasonably strong password. Video cards can be used to speed up the recovery with GPU acceleration, yet the GPU market is currently overheated, and most high-end video cards are severely overpriced. Today, we’ll test a bunch of low-end video cards and compare their price/performance ratio.

Most modern CPUs are multi-core – it is not easy to find even a laptop with less than two cores these days. And for desktops, 4 cores are usual now.

Looking for new password cracking hardware (to take advantage of GPU acceleration)? Wait just a little bit more: new ATI and NVIDIA cards (with DirectX 11) will be available soon.

According to NordicHardware, Sapphire Or Zotac Might Launch Larrabee. No further information on Larrabee yet, though; as we already wrote, the Larrabee lauch date is set to 2010. The only news from Intel so far is about i3, i5, i7 CPU naming system: Lynnfield, Clarksfield, Arrandale, Clarkdale; besides, Intel plans shipments of 32nm ‘Clarkdale’ in Q4.

When it comes to Larrabee one of most intriguing things is its performance. Official information provided by Intel was not enough to get good estimation. In my previous post I’ve estimated it as "roughly equivalent to GTX 295". Well, it seems I was too optimistic. Latest rumors are that current Larrabee samples deliver same performance as GTX 285.

The summer has begun, and as usual at this time of the year big companies present the results of hard work to the public. With Microsoft’s Bing and Google Wave flooding the news, you might have overlooked the joint release of NVIDIA and Supermicro. At Computex 2009 in Taipei, Taiwan, Nvidia and Supermicro announced

Hardware acceleration of password recovery has been a hot topic for quite some time already. We were the first to adopt widely available graphic cards for this purpose and we’re proud of this. Today I’d like to share some thoughts on hardware acceleration for password recovery, its past, present, and future. I will also cover the most frequently asked questions regarding GPUs.

First of all, sad news: Intel Larrabee is delayed till 2010 (we were expecting it in Q4’2009), according to the reports. With 32 cores onboard (though this number is not confirmed yet), it looks like a very good system for password cracking. Some Larrabee development tools and resources are already available, and of course, we’re porting our code to this platform, and will share the results with you as soon as we’ll be able to (we’re under the NDA with Intel; as well as with Nvidia and AMD :)).

Considering Intel Core i7? Read Nvidia Says Core i7 Isn’t Worth It and nVidia calls Core i7 a waste of money first. We’d agree that investing into GPU(s) is really a good idea, especially if you need to crack passwords.