What I wanted to do was find an Intel CPU that has similar performance and has been benchmarked on hashcat; it's still not ideal but it would be a lot better than what I've done above.
A different way of looking at it might be to use a CPU example from the bottom of
https://hashcat.net/hashcat/. Info about Knight's Landing was a bit hard to find, with Wikipedia claiming it was anounced 2 or 3 years ago, and Intel saying some of them are still to be released; but they're given as having 64 (ish) cores, and somehow 4 times as many threads (hyperthreading but better?). If each thread can do as much as one from a Phenom II X6 T1090 @ 3.8 GHz from the link above (those benchmarks are outdated by the way, says it used hashcat 0.40) then:
total power = 40960 CPUs * equivalent Intel power per CPU
= 40960 * 12.9 MH/s * 64 cores * 4 threads each
= 135,000,000 MH/s
Which is actually relatively close to what I had before!
This is an overestimate, since these Xeon Phi's (and the Chinese things) don't run at 3.8 GHz, but rather at about 1.5 GHz - I assumed each SW CPU can run hashcat just as well as a single Xeon Phi, and that a Xeon Phi thread is as fast as a single Phenom thread; I realise this is probably a gross overestimate.
It does however mean that my earlier estimate is about right, within about a single order of magnitude, which I'm happy with, and that that bloke from epixoip's link really is pulling numbers out of his arse.
More numbers:
- 135,000,000 MH/s while pulling 15.3 MW gives about 8.8 MH/s / W
A GTX 1080 does about 25,000MH/s at 183 W (from epixoip's bench) giving a whopping 136 MH/s / W !
We can conclude that the Chinese didn't build this thing for hash cracking efficiency.
- It has 1.31 PB of "primary memory", that's about 1030 MH/s / GB; a 1080 does about 3000
I have no idea if this a useful statistic (insofar as any of this is "useful" - just a bit of fun for me).
-
this says it cost about USD 270M total - Building, hardware, software and R&D
this comes out very nicely to exactly 0.5 MH/s / $
I've no idea how much a functional system using a 1080 costs, but if we take it to be USD 2000 then that's about 12.5 MH/s / $, or 25 times better.
Conclusion? It's really really fast, but you'd be better off using lots and lots of 1080s if you want perf/dollar or power efficiency.