RSA performance on Athlon64 vs. Itanium

[Peter Gutmann]

"J.A. Terranson" <measl at mfn.org> writes:
>On Sun, 12 Oct 2003, Lucky Green wrote:
>> I just picked up an Athlon64 3200+, which runs at a 2 GHz clock speed.
>> Using the Red Hat for AMD64 beta and the version of OpenSSL that ships
>> with that beta, I get 922 1024-bit RSA signs per second. This is a tad
>> less RSA signatures per second than I have seen on an 800MHz Itanium
>> using highly optimized assembler. That's rather poor performance on the
>> Athlon64.
>>
>> Are the figures that I am seeing typical for OpenSSL on the Athlon64?
>> Has anybody here seen different figures using optimized code?
>
>Was there ever a reply to this?  If so, could someone forward it to me off-
>list, as I missed it :-(

The reply, sent off-list, was something like "You're running x86-32 code on an
x86-64 CPU in emulation mode, what do you expect?" :-).  In addition the
Itanium RSA demo code works by turning the CPU into a $1000 ASIC, so you'd
need to test it for SSL handshakes per second or something similar where the
CPU has to do some other work besides RSA crypto ops.

Peter.