General Purpose Factoring Records

Below is a chart of general purpose factoring records going back to 1990. By "general purpose", we mean a factoring algorithms whose running time is dependent upon only the size of the number being factored (i.e. not on the size of the prime factors or any particular form of the number).

Sieving is typically the dominant factorization run time in practice. All sieving times below are approximate. Early versions of factoring records estimated time in MIPS years, which is the number of years it would take a computer that operates at one million instructions per second to factor the number. More recently, almost everybody uses Pentiums or AMDs. Thus, we scale some timings to Pentium 1GHz CPU years: the number of years it would take a 1GHz Pentium (or AMD) to complete sieving.

number	digits	date completed	sieving time	algorithm
C116	116	1990	275 MIPS years	mpqs
RSA-120	120	June, 1993	830 MIPS years	mpqs
RSA-129	129	April, 1994	5000 MIPS years	mpqs
RSA-130	130	April, 1996	1000 MIPS years	gnfs
RSA-140	140	February, 1999	2000 MIPS years	gnfs
RSA-155	155	August, 1999	8000 MIPS years	gnfs
C158	158	January, 2002	3.4 Pentium 1GHz CPU years	gnfs
RSA-160	160	March, 2003	2.7 Pentium 1GHz CPU years	gnfs
RSA-576	174	December, 2003	13.2 Pentium 1GHz CPU years	gnfs
C176	176	May, 2005	48.6 Pentium 1GHz CPU years	gnfs
RSA-200	200	May, 2005	121 Pentium 1GHz CPU years [*]	gnfs

[*] In regard to RSA-200, Thorsten Kleinjung writes: we spend 25% of the total time for the matrix step. If one considers the total time we spent about 170 CPU years.

For more factorization results, please see the Factorization Announcements page or Paul Zimmermann's Factor Records page.

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