C3 Nehemia C5P with better hardware RNG and AES support

Steve Schear s.schear at comcast.net
Thu Oct 23 07:04:53 PDT 2003


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 





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