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Comment by erk__ | Hacker News Reader

There is also no other place that will just implement conversions between utf formats, compression in hardware or various hashed and other crypto in hardware like they do.

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I'm pretty sure that at least a few of those are implemented in modern x86 / ARM CPUs? As an immediate example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set

Another, introduced around the same time (SHA instruction set): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA_instruction_set

Yeah there are some of those, but IBM has stuff like Ed25519 signatures, x86 at least seems to be a bit on the back foot when it comes to implementing things like that. They will probably rather wait until AES is popular before they add it.

Nitpick: the SPARC M7/M7 have hardware compression.

That is very cool I had no idea, seems like it is also in the newer T8/M8 according to this whitepaper: https://www.oracle.com/dk/a/ocom/docs/sparc-t8-m8-server-arc...

Modern consoles provide hardware decompression to transfer compressed assets from the NVME directly to the GPU. Similar functionality is coming to PCs in the form of DirectStorage and Vulkan extensions.

Yeah the newest PlayStation have a hardware implementation of Oodle which is really cool. Z/Arch have a inflate/deflate implementation which makes it a bit more general than the texture decompression.

Hardware decompression can increase overall processing performance over uncompressed data because I/o is slow.

Heck even without hardware decompression it is often faster.

Considering mainframe sweet spot is I/o processing, not surprising.

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