Yes, the group that is headquartered at http://www.dcypher.net/ was operating a competing effort to search for the same key that distributed.net was. Their effort was launched approximately one week before distributed.net's effort was officially released to the public. Additionally, their clients were reportedly about twice as fast as distributed.net's initial client because dcypher's development had focused heavily on MMX assembly optimizations for Intel processors running Windows. However, distributed.net's focus has always been towards well designed clients that are easily ported to a variety of architectures and operating systems. After a brief period of further development, distributed.net later released MMX enabled clients that were more than comparable in speed to dcypher's.
|