Stuart Henderson wrote:
The systems using VIA processors are very much faster even
without hardware AES support since they have a better PCI system;
the models with accelerated encryption do so by using new CPU
instructions, rather than a device which must be accessed over
the PCI bus. There's far less overhead because of this.
I'll second this. My VIA EN15000 is quite fast when it comes to IPSEC
and the motherboard+cpu utilizes ~20W...if that.
I had trouble find a good crypto implementation that was fully supported
and worked well. This statement by Theo helped my decision though:
~~~snip~~~
Theo de Raadt is quoted as saying, "There's just no way to describe how
happy we were to find such an inexpensive, blazingly fast, and correctly
operating device as the VIA Eden-N processor's Padlock ACE ..." OpenBSD
3.4 has support for this processor and its integrated cryptographic engine.
~~~snip~~~
This gave me some confidence that the VIA was the right choice.
