From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.medford.ma.us>
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 95 08:17:33 PDT
To: Damien.Doligez@inria.fr (Damien Doligez)
Subject: Re: Cost to Crack Keys
In-Reply-To: <9508181407.AA07951@couchey.inria.fr>
Message-ID: <199508181501.PAA00845@orchard.medford.ma.us>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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And I think your cost estimate is also too high.  You're assuming
$5000 per system, and that's way too high.

You only need a power supply, a motherboard, a processor, a *tiny*
amount of RAM, a network device of some sort (so you can netboot the
systems), and probably a cheezeball display card; you can put one or
two monitors on a cart if you *really* need one hooked up.

You don't need a disk or disk controller -- it's just something else
to break..

Prices selected by throwing darts at the August Computer Shopper.
There are probably lower ones..

	P120 motherboard + processor:	$1099
	P100 motherboard + processor:	  666

	case & power supply:		  $40
	network card (10base2):		  $40

	4MB memory:			 $160
	VGA display card:		  $29
	keyboard:			  $15

So, one could put together a P100 compute server for about $1000, and
a P120 for about $1400.. the P100 is a better deal at this point.

I suspect that with a little work, you could share power supplies
between multiple motherboards, rack-mount the systems, share
keyboards, etc.  You might need a slightly more expensive LAN card for
netbooting...

That cuts your cost estimate down by a factor of about 3 or better, to
around $350.00

I think your electricity estimate may be a bit low, but electricity is
expensive where I live in the northeast U.S...

					- Bill

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