C3 Nehemia C5P with better hardware RNG and AES support

Lucky Green shamrock at cypherpunks.to
Wed Oct 22 23:04:18 PDT 2003


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.

--Lucky Green





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