2^36 "operations" can still take a lot of time if each operation is multiplying two giant numbers, unless the meaning of "operation" is somehow normalized to mean e.g. 64 bit integer operations.
> 2^36 "operations" can still take a lot of time if each operation is multiplying two giant number
It took me 3.3 years of actual computation time to do about 2^46 multiplication+modulo of two 2048 bit numbers on a Core i7. 2^36 of 2048 bit numbers should be doable in a day on an eight years old CPU.
P.S: that was on a single core, for the problem I solved was explicitly created as to not be parallelizable.
It didn't take long for custom ASICs for mining bitcoin to emerge. It wouldn't take long for custom ASICs to do these kinds of operations a lot faster than on a general purpose CPU to emerge.
