> The value of t was chosen to take into consideration the growth in computational power due to "Moore's Law". Based on the SEMATECH National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (1997 edition), we can expect internal chip speeds to increase by a factor of approximately 13 overall up to 2012, when the clock rates reach about 10GHz. After that improvements seem more difficult, but we estimate that another factor of five might be achievable by 2034. Thus, the overall rate of computation should go through approximately six doublings by 2034.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what factors are relevant for cryptographic functions.
In 1999 they had coppermine 1133 single-core @ 1.1ghz (~ 2 gflops), in 2012 we now had sandy bridge 3970 quad-core @ 3.4ghz (> 100 Gflops). So at least according to one measure the factor of increase is more like 50 than 13.
> The value of t was chosen to take into consideration the growth in computational power due to "Moore's Law". Based on the SEMATECH National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (1997 edition), we can expect internal chip speeds to increase by a factor of approximately 13 overall up to 2012, when the clock rates reach about 10GHz. After that improvements seem more difficult, but we estimate that another factor of five might be achievable by 2034. Thus, the overall rate of computation should go through approximately six doublings by 2034.
I asked about progress on this puzzle at stack exchange here http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/5831/what-is-the-p... and got some nice answers.