64 Bits ought to be enough for anybody!

Summary: A Trail of Bits experiment measured how long it takes to brute-force a 64-bit value, starting from 133 years with a naive loop and 39 years with hand-vectorized AVX-512 code on a single core. Using 4x NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs cut the estimate to about 22 days, with a lone V100 roughly 18.5x as fast as 16 high-CPU cores.
What's compelling: The author notes that fuzzing commonly hits comparisons against 64-bit magic values, and that cloud vCPUs are hyperthreads whose performance depends on which physical cores they land on - so capacity planning based on vCPU counts can mislead.

Read the original at Trail of Bits Blog ↗