The following major changes have been made since John 1.6:

* Bitslice DES code for x86 with MMX: more than twice faster than older non-bitslice MMX code.
* Bitsliced the LM hash code as well: now several times faster.
* Significant improvements to the generic bitslice DES code: +20% on RISC.
* PowerPC G4+ AltiVec support (Mac OS X and Linux): effective 128-bitness for bitslice DES, resulting in huge speedups.
* First attempt at generic vectorization support for bitslice DES.
* Two MD5 hashes at a time for extra ILP on RISC: up to +80% on Alpha EV5+.
* Generic Blowfish x86 assembly code in addition to the original Pentium version: +15% on the Pentium Pro family (up to and including Pentium III), +20% on AMD K6 (Pentium 4 and newer AMD CPUs are more happy running the original Pentium code for Blowfish).
* Verbose logging of events to the global or a session-specific log file.
* Better idle priority emulation with POSIX.1b (POSIX.4) scheduling calls.
* System-wide installation support for *BSD ports and Linux distributions.
* AIX, DU/Tru64 C2, HP-UX tcb files support in unshadow.
* New make targets for Linux/x86-64, Linux/PowerPC, FreeBSD/Alpha, OpenBSD/x86-64, OpenBSD/Alpha, OpenBSD/SPARC, OpenBSD/SPARC64, OpenBSD/PowerPC, OpenBSD/PA-RISC, OpenBSD/VAX, NetBSD/VAX, Solaris/SPARC64, Mac OS X (PowerPC and x86), SCO, BeOS.
* Bug and portability fixes, and new bugs.
* Bonus: "Strip" cracker included in the default john.conf (john.ini).

http://www.openwall.com/john/

Let us know your experiences with this or any other version of John the Ripper.

Don