The hardware side is certainly familiar:

Game consoles use hardware specialized for the computational needs of the detailed 3D graphics in games. This hardware is also very suited for the basic arithmetic used in cryptographic algorithms and greatly outperforms general purpose computers on brute-force computations. We have found that one PlayStation 3 game console is equivalent to about 40 modern single core processors. The most computationally intensive part of our method required about 3 days of work with over 200 game consoles, which is equivalent to 32 years of computing on a typical desktop computer. Common graphic cards have been used by some for MD5 cryptanalysis as well.
GPU and game console processors are much better at this sort of thing than your general purpose PC processor.