From owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Oct 15 13:03:18 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 32B10106566C for ; Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:03:18 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from dean@fragfest.com.au) Received: from mail15.syd.optusnet.com.au (mail15.syd.optusnet.com.au [211.29.132.196]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id ABCE98FC20 for ; Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:03:17 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [172.29.0.131] (c122-106-149-121.carlnfd1.nsw.optusnet.com.au [122.106.149.121]) by mail15.syd.optusnet.com.au (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id n9FD39mB008871 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NO); Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:03:11 +1100 Message-ID: <4AD71DD8.4030009@fragfest.com.au> Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:04:24 +1100 From: Dean Hamstead User-Agent: Mozilla-Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 (X11/20090701) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Steve Polyack References: <4AD3728E.8010509@comcast.net> In-Reply-To: <4AD3728E.8010509@comcast.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: John Case , freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: SSL/AES acceleration in FreeBSD ? X-BeenThere: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: General discussion of FreeBSD hardware List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:03:18 -0000 > You will may find that for any fairly modern dual-core CPU (even an > Athlon64 X2), the CPU will outperform pretty much all of the hardware > crypto-accelerator offerings, except for the most recent and high-end. > This is *especially* true when you are doing many small cryptographic > operations, which I assume Tor may be doing. You'll still at least get > the benefit of offloading all of these operations from the CPU, freeing > it up to spend time on other tasks. this website gives more details confirming this statement. http://sslacceleration.info/64bit.shtml Interestingly, GMP benchmarking puts the Athlon64 significantly ahead of the intel offerings (i7 being one of them) for complex math. Although one must consider that the compilers are different versions etc. http://gmplib.org/gmpbench.html Certainly, given the low cost of the amd64 chips. For a CPU bound task like SSL Acceleration, it would be interesting to see what the best bang for buck would be in a cluster. Dean