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Moore's Law is sometimes used to describe the growth in transistor counts on circuit boards. It suggests a doubling every 18 months to two years, with a finite growth limit once transistor sizes reach the molecular level.
Processing speed doesn't necessarily grow at the same rate. It has been suggested that for a 50 per cent growth in transistor numbers, total processing power might only grow 15 to 20 per cent, due to limitations in other parts of the CPU and its interfaces.
So when it comes to cracking passwords or precomputing hash tables, it seems we're limited by technology. Projects such as RainbowCrack have attempted to solve this by distributing the load over vast numbers of PCs, but it took months to compute hash tables for longer passwords. Even today, tables for passwords with more than eight characters are rare.
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