[LeifCarrotson]

Well sure, at many orders of magnitude more cost. If you wanted to brute-force RSA, you'd be better off leveraging economies of scale to operate ten thousand current-gen 4nm GPUs running at 2 GHz with air coolers than a single exotic prototype 1nm ASIC running at 8 GHz with cryogenic cooling.

Aside from LCS35, most cryptographic problems are about as easy with two processors that are half as fast as one processor that costs twice as much.

[rowanG077]

That is if your problem is parallelizable. There are a ton of sequential problems that are hard or impossible to break up.

[voxic11]

What would be an example that the NSA would be interested in?

[rowanG077]

Well I'm not an NSA engineer but I can imagine complex real-time analysis of streaming data, think processing 400+GbE link data. It quickly becomes too much too store, analysis could impose sequential packet dependencies.