Crypto on Chip

This is not something new but I hope we can see more of this in server-class CPUs in the future: Sun Fire T2000 and Secure Applications.

The basic idea is to have a cryptographic accelerator on chip, to make certain operations, like those required by SSL, much more fast and inexpensive.

Its a big win for a lot of companies who want to offer SSL to his clients but can't due to the cost of scaling up SSL ops.

It's not the first time I heard of this. There where PCI accelerator boards for quite some time, that you can offload most of the crypto tasks to, and even moving it to the CPU has been done before, even in the x86 world. I think I remember the VIA Padlock Initiative included some support for crypto acceleration.

If you want to know more, check the the SSL Acceleration page.

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