08-06-2024, 06:36 PM
It's possible that you could get some algorithms working, I've explored alternative processors quite a few times. That being said, you've already identified the reason why we typically don't spend much time on it. The 4090(and really GPUs in general) remains the best performance per dollar, even at it's relatively high MSRP. Beyond that, it's well supported and easy to code for, and the code is portable and not device specific. FPGAs are becoming worthwhile in a few cases, and you will see support for those as hashcat grows, but those cases are extremely specific(bcrypt, scrypt, etc.) and FPGA devices are both very expensive and also fairly difficult to write kernels for. My guess is that a "many-core" chip is probably one of the most decent alternative processor to play with, but I don't expect it to perform very well outside of maybe a few edge cases with anti-GPU algorithms.