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Is this still true? I understood SHA256 to be faster than SHA512 due to hardware acceleration on current CPUs; dedicated instructions exist for the former but not the latter.

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It seems like it's not true on a MacBook with the Apple M1 processor; SHA-256 is now significantly faster. It still seems to be true on a couple of Intel machines I have access to.

Googling i noticed there seems to be a bug in openssl where it does not use optimized sha-512 on m1 (but does for sha256) - https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/14897 so that might be the explanation.

Also i think the length of the input matters when comparing sha256 vs sha512.

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