If the answer is "it would take $1000 worth of Amazon EC2 computing to crack a single weak password", well, that's certainly feasible to do if you have a specific target in mind.
If the answer is "it would take $1000 worth of Amazon EC2 computing to crack a single weak password", well, that's certainly feasible to do if you have a specific target in mind.
I'm assuming that your "8 character password" is assuming a randomly-generated password. I'm curious what the expected cost would be of breaking a particularly weak one (e.g. a human-generated password, based on dictionary words although perhaps with mnemonic devices or letter/number substitutions). The paper you linked says their hardware computed 6511 passwords per second at a cost factor of 5, and based on the cycle costs listed, I'm thinking it does 52 passwords per second at a cost factor of 12. Assuming a particularly weak password, I don't know how many passwords a brute-forcer would expect to have to try before hitting the correct one.