Re:Ampere Altra 80-core ARM CPU
by magicalhippo on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @12:21PM
(#22476534)
As a n00b, is that down to poor or lacking encryption hardware support ala AES-NI? Or something else?
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Yes.
You did make sure the AES instructions were used, right?
I wouldn't be surprised the AES unit on the eMAG is relatively slow — other units seem to be as well, e.g. in my silly CRC32 benchmark, the Arm Cortex-A72 did 1kb in 79 ns at just 2.0 GHz while the eMAG did it in 103 ns at much faster clocks (3.0 or 3.3 GHz).
I suspect they might have reused these HW blocks from the old Applied Micro X-Gene :D
But now on the new product, it's all Arm Neoverse cores, it's gonna be great.