alt Hacker News> That isn’t happening with how we make computers today.
Keep here in mind that computers today have features approaching the size of a single atom, switching frequencies where the time to cross a single chip from one end to the other is becoming multiple cycles, and power densities that require us to operate at the physical limits of heat transfer for matter that exists at ambient conditions.
We can squeeze it quite a bit further, sure. But anything like 20-30 orders of magnitude is just laughable even with an infinite supply of unobtanium and fairy dust.
Replies
the8472 • today at 11:37 AM
We're nowhere near physical heat transfer limits. CNTs and monoisotopic diamond perform much better than silver. The latter can even be used as substrate.
You don't need to keep shrinking features. Brute forcing is highly parallel; to break a key within a certain time frame all you need is a large enough quantity of chips. While it's in the realm of science fiction today, in a few centuries we might have nanorobots that can tile the entire surface of mars with processors. That would get you enough orders of magnitude of additional compute to break a 128 bit key. 256 bit would probably still be out though.