Declan McCullagh
The TDES engine offers the same throughput as that of DES engine as we have engineered the pipeline design such that performance isn't degraded on TDES. The only difference is the start up latency. The start up latency for X-Wall SE-64A is 90 nano second and for X-Wall SE-128A is 270 nano second.
The suspicion when this was discussed after the RSA conference was that, based on performance figures, they were doing something like using 3 DES engines and pushing 3 different blocks through them at once (or a single DES engine with per-round pipelining), this restricting them to the insecure ECB mode. Using one of the parallelisable modes would have been a better move. The fact that they were using ECB lead to the inevitable suspicions that there'd be other security problems present as well - I think Lucky's condemnation may have been a bit strong (it's not totally insecure), but the use of ECB mode doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the design of the rest of the system, even if it was done for pragmatic reasons. Peter.