RSA on general-purpose CPU's [was:RE: Secure peripheral cards]

[Lucky Green]

Adam Back wrote:
> openSSL on a PIII-633Mhz can do 265 512 bit CRT RSA per 
> second, or 50 1024 bit CRT RSA per second.  So wether it will 
> even speed up current entry-level systems depends on the 
> correct interpretation of the product sheet.  
> 
> And the economics of course depends on how expensive they are 
> relative to general purpose CPUs, plus the added complexity 
> of using embedded hardware and drivers and getting to play 
> with your web server. General purpose CPUs are _really_ fast 
> and cheap right now.

Newer general-purpose CPU architectures offer even better performance:
one of the sample program for IA-64 that Intel has published on their
Itanium performance benchmark CDROM handed out at tradeshows clocks
about 1000 1024-bit RSA signings per second on an 800 MHz Itanium CPU.

--Lucky


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