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Comment by delusional | Hacker News Reader

That's not how you asses performance at all. Maybe you can saturate the NVMe link with AES in idea circumstances, but you may be killing memory mapping and churning I$.

To say anything interesting about performance on these modern machines, you would have to benchmark some real workload.

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5 year old CPUs (Intel i7-6700, for example) do 2.6GB/s.

https://calomel.org/aesni_ssl_performance.html

First gen Ryzen (similar age) does 8.2GB/s, which is faster than PCIe 4 NVMe drives.

https://www.vortez.net/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_1800x_revi...

Somewhat recent intel i7-12700H does 14.8GB/s, which is about the limit of PCIe 5 NVMe drives.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i7-12700H-Processor...

Edit: here's a list of AES speeds via truecrypt. top of the charts is the Ryzen 9 7950X at 32GB/s.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Benchmarks-and-Test-Results.14...

Thank you for looking up the most recent performance numbers. People have no idea how incredible they are and how "free" FDE has become.

How much does this affect other processes happening at the same time? If I'm playing an open world game that streams the environment off the ssd, how much is this going to contend with my cpu issuing draw calls, doing physics calculations, etc.

Speaking of which, software that doesn’t use the AES-NI instructions is becoming glaringly obvious because the performance difference is so huge.

In the era of mechanical drives and 2 Mbps “broadband” nobody would notice. Now with SSDs and gigabit home internet, people do notice but vendors are still pretending they can just ignore the need to offload encryption.

VPN products and IPsec especially is almost always a disaster in my experience.

When evaluating any kind of network security product like a virtual WAN appliance, tunnel, or whatever, check the throughput. If it can get tens of gigabits for a single stream then it is using some sort of offload. If it seems to hit the wall at around 1.5 Gbps per core, do not buy.

AES instructions still fill CPU's time regardless of how fast they run

Doing 2.6GB/s in single thread means you have one core less to use...

I run FDE on all my machines, encryption and sector sizes are aligned, I can still do a 3000MB/s IO no problem. Doesn't affect anything I'm running, even databases like Postgres.

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