[Cryptography] on-chip crypto accelerators (was: floating point)

[Henry Baker]

At 10:42 PM 12/27/2014, John Denker wrote:
>One big reason we've been discussing floating point is 
>that FPUs are very powerful and very widely available. 
>A goodly fraction of the real estate on a typical
>processor chip is taken up by the FPU.  So if you 
>can get the FPU to do your bidding, it's a big win.
>
>Meanwhile, we should keep in mind that there are other 
>things in the same category, including MMX/SSE as well
>as GPU.  There exist crypto algorithms implemented as 
>GPU programs.
>
>More importantly, some modern processors have onboard crypto accelerators
>  http://www.linleygroup.com/mpr/article.php?id=11088
>  https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibmi/library/i-ibmi-7_2-and-ibm-power8/#N101B5
>also
>  http://semiaccurate.com/2013/02/19/lsi-launches-a-16-core-arm-a15-cell-phone-chip/
>
>It may be that the FPU is not optimized for our purposes,
>but that stops being relevant when the crypto accelerator
>does the job.

The BCD accelerator looks a lot more interesting&fun:

"The DFU efficiently supports binary-coded decimal (BCD) math"