SSL/AES acceleration in FreeBSD ?

[Dean Hamstead]

> You will may find that for any fairly modern dual-core CPU (even an 
> Athlon64 X2), the CPU will outperform pretty much all of the hardware 
> crypto-accelerator offerings, except for the most recent and high-end.  
> This is *especially* true when you are doing many small cryptographic 
> operations, which I assume Tor may be doing.  You'll still at least get 
> the benefit of offloading all of these operations from the CPU, freeing 
> it up to spend time on other tasks.

this website gives more details confirming this statement.

http://sslacceleration.info/64bit.shtml

Interestingly, GMP benchmarking puts the Athlon64 significantly ahead of 
the intel offerings (i7 being one of them) for complex math. Although 
one must consider that the compilers are different versions etc.

http://gmplib.org/gmpbench.html

Certainly, given the low cost of the amd64 chips. For a CPU bound task 
like SSL Acceleration, it would be interesting to see what the best bang 
for buck would be in a cluster.


Dean