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Comment by moonchild | Hacker News Reader

My understanding was that sha-3 should be faster than sha-2, in a general sense, but sha-2 has hardware acceleration. Is that incorrect?

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I think SHA-3 is almost always slower in software, in theory SHA-3 could be hardware accelerated of course, but on both current AMD and Intel systems it's not, where SHA-2-256 is.

AArch64 supports accelerated SHA-3, available on production systems since 2019 with the Apple A13, judging by https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/c35ed40f4f1bd8afd7...

Power10 also supports accelerated SHA-3: https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp5649.pdf (p150)

Accelerated SHA-3 on x86_64 is probably an inevitability; the question is more when than if.

SHA-3 is available on QuickAssist.

https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/cryptographic-algorithm-valid...

For those not familiar with QuickAssist, it is a cryptography and compression accelerator connected through PCIe, which is available in some models of Intel server CPUs or server chipsets and in a few models of Intel server Ethernet NICs.

Moreover, the laptop variants of Alder Lake (H-series, P-series and U-series) are said in the Intel Ark web site to include a subset of QuickAssist, but I have not been able to find any public Intel document explaining which functions are supported by laptop Alder Lake CPUs or any report of someone testing these functions on laptop Alder Lake CPUs.

Most Android smartphones support SHA3 starting with the 2018 models (i.e. Cortex-A55, Cortex-A75 or newer).

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