14 DAY TRIAL // Graphics cards have evolved significantly in recent years, stepping from a gaming-focused device to a hardware component designed to boost the performance of various applications, thanks to the multi-core architecture of graphics cards. On that note, ElcomSoft announced today that it added support for ATI Radeon graphics cards to its iPhone Password Breaker solution. According to the developer, this feature has significantly improved the performance of its application, compared to the performance achieved on Intel's latest processors or NVIDIA's enterprise-level Tesla solutions.
The announcement is rather interesting, mainly because the majority of GPU-optimized applications that have been announced in recent times have been designed to take advantage NVIDIA's CUDA-compatible GPUs. This solution from ElcomSoft appears to have been developed to enable ATI Radeon HD 5000-series GPUs to deliver a considerable performance boost, when compared to Intel's Core i7 960 or NVIDIA's Tesla GPUs.
“Benchmarks performed by ElcomSoft demonstrate that ATI Radeon HD5970 accelerated password recovery works up to 20 times faster than Core i7-960, Intel's current top of the line CPU unit. The password recovery speed of the new sub-thousand dollar video card from ATI exceeds the performance of enterprise-grade NVIDIA Tesla solutions priced at $10,000. When password recovery is concerned, ATI Radeon HD5970 provides twice the performance of NVIDIA Tesla for a fraction of the price,” the company claims.
The company's iPhone Password Breaker is designed to grant forensic access to information stored in Apple devices, by recovering password-protected backups to iPhone, iPhone 3G and 3GS, as well as the iPod Touch 1st to 3rd generation. The application is designed to take advantage of the parallel computing processing power of NVIDIA and ATI GPUs.
The company also announced that it planned to benchmark the upcoming NVIDIA Tesla and Fermi-based graphics cards, to record the performance difference between NVIDIA and ATI solutions. However, at this time, the HD 5970 dual-GPU graphics card appears to provide the best performance for the iPhone Password Breaker.