C3 Nehemia C5P with better hardware RNG and AES support

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 11:04 PM 10/22/03 -0700, Lucky Green wrote:
>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, the VIA chip is for SOHO not servers.   Therefore modexp is
not a bottleneck, its a "one time" cost well performed by the
x86 in a few hundred msec.  On the other hand, the AES hardware could
provide
a substantial relief for the CPU for VPN apps, despite its relative
ease in software compared to DES.

Remember that the modexp cores out there are generally intended
for "high end" apps like commercial-server cards.  Though their gate
count isn't too bad, they tend to require a large number of RAM
controllers and embedded RAM for the operands.  If you've got
a good fraction of a second to spend, and have a general purpose
CPU, you don't need hardware acceleration for modexp.

As I wrote previously, I'd expect to see better integrated peripheral
support (eg integrated ether or two) before I saw modexp support.

---
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to
chance."
 -Robert R. Coveyou ORNL mathematician