Details of the latest Intel "Nehalem" CPUs have been released
Details of the latest Intel "Nehalem" CPUs have been released, and of particular interest are a number of hardware features to accelerate AES encryption. Encryption can be a performance bottleneck in many high bandwidth VPN applications, so any assistance from hardware will provide a welcome performance boost (even if the speed of encryption is not a limiting factor, reducing the CPU utilization will speed up other tasks on the host). The new instructions could speed up AES encryption by 3-9 times depending on the application. Previous hardware improvements by Intel have improved support in hardware for pattern matching, which is potentially of use for intrusion detection and content filtering.
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