At 11:04 PM 10/22/2003 -0700, Lucky Green wrote:

Peter wrote:

...

In case anyone's interested, there's a cpu die photo at http://www.sandpile.org/impl/pics/centaur/c5xl/die_013_c5p.jpg showing the amount of real estate consumed by the crypto functions (it's the bottom centre, a bit hard to read the label).

I fail to understand why VIA bothered adding AES support into the CPU. When was AES last the bottleneck on a general-purpose CPU? The bottleneck tends to be modular exponentiations, yet VIA failed to include a modular exponentiation engine. Strange.

Cylink made it mark in the early 90s by building the first commercial modular exponentiation chips to power its encryptor boxes. So the need for it this was well known even then. steve