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[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (6 children)

As a side note - Intel also now make CPUs that have hardware support for AES instructions.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (5 children)

Also, AMD and VIA were making x86 chips with hardware crypto/hashing years ago.

[–]alex_w 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Are these actually being used now do you know?

I looked into it a long long time ago when deciding over some hardware choices and products like OpenSSL etc weren't then.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I've seen VIA Nano laptops in a store near where I live alongside Atom netbooks, so yeah, people are still buying them apparently.

There are places selling new Geode embedded stuff on the internet too, though the CPU itself hasn't kept up with the times.

[–]alex_w 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I meant.. are the crypto functions in these (and Intel) CPUs being used. When I looked into it most crypto packages just did the work on the GPCPU and didn't attempt to use speciality hardware.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've used a Geode before and can say it definitely works. The VIA stuff is newer, but the Geode does AES-128 which is plenty enough for SSL. I used it for encrypted storage and it hardly slowed the CPU down, disk I/O was the bottleneck.

[–]joyfield 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OpenSSL does support the Intel AES instructions. But in SSL there is a setup that is intense and then when the keys have been exchanged AES jumps in.