SHA-crypt analysis

SHA-crypt hashes are decent (albeit not a technical improvement), especially the flavor based on SHA-512
Uses 64-bit machine words; not SIMD, though
SHA-512 is not as GPU-friendly as e.g. MD5, yet is reasonable to attack on current GPUs (2012)
SHA-crypt based on SHA-512 at default rounds=5000 can be attacked at ~11500 c/s on NVIDIA GTX 570 1.6 GHz with a John the Ripper patch by Claudio Andre
bcrypt at "$2a$08" (256 iterations), which is default on some systems and is achieving similar validation speed to the above, can be attacked at ~680 c/s on AMD FX-8120 3.1 GHz (combined speed for 8 threads) with John the Ripper; no speedup from GPUs yet (but this may change)