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RSA Encryption
Security issues are becoming more and more important. Cybercrime has an annual growth rate of about 70%, encompassing identity theft, extortion and other nastinesses. Encryption of data can be very time consuming and potentially adds a huge bandwidth overhead to any transaction. One thing to keep in mind is that some of the encryption libraries work better with some CPUs, others work better with others and vice versa. This poses a certain dilemma since some of the software was recompiled to work best with the Athlon 64 and while it boosted the performance, it concomitantly caused a severe performance hit for the P4. One possibility would have been to use the "best of all" scenarios, however, without knowing the exact details of of the optimizations we feel reluctant about anything like this. In order to avoid confusion, we will show only a few selected benchmarks all of which were run on the "non-optimized" software.
The AMD optimizations would cause a huge performance hit on the P4 while boosting the 32-bit Athlon scores.
Encryption: top column, decryption: bottom column
The Athlon and the P4 would both profit from the optimizations with the P4 seeing the greater boost here.
Encryption: top column, decryption: bottom column. Both the P4 and the Athlon would see a sizeable boost from the AMD optimizations in AES
The numbers shown above only show one thing which is that it is possible and probably necessary to recompile the encryption libraries for each processor. With the optimized code each processor runs better, but it is not possible to interchange the libraries between processors, at least not without doing some major homework. Getting into all the gory detail here would exceed the scope of this review, if warranted, we will follow up with a separate article on these issues.
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