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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (142916)	9/6/2001 11:49:12 AM
From: tcmay	Respond to of 186894

RSA benchmarks for Itanium vs. Ultrasparc II/III << Hi Tim, RE: "A friend of mine who works at RSA recently apprised me of some optimized Itanium benchmarks. Even the 733 MHz Itanium grossly outperformed the Ultrasparc III." Can you post these benchmarks? >> I will only refer to what's been published. Google has a bunch of news items and benchmarks showing the dramatic improvements over Ultrasparc gotten by the IA-64, even the first-gen ones. Not only are the newer (McKinley, Madison) versions likely to increase these figures by a factor of a few, but improvements in optimizing for the IA-64 continue. Here's an article: itworld.com Part of the text of the article says: "From a security perspective, he said, the net result of the faster chip is faster encryption and decryption of data. In fact, Itanium will perform 1,250 RSA 1024-bit decrypts per second on a single processor or 1,376 Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) decrypts per second on four processors. "Comparatively, the survey showed that Sun Microsystems Inc.'s 900-MHz UltraSPARC III workstations can do 192 RSA decrypts per second and the Sun UltraSPARC II hardware SSL accelerator can decrypt 232 per second. " My friend at RSA told me about even more recent results, with further compiler optimizations done by Eric A. Young (famed as the man behind SSLeay, now working for RSA). So far as I know, these haven't been released yet, so I won't do so here. Here's an older result, from an issue of Intel's Developer magazine, converted from PDF to text by Google: (findable in PDF form with Google--search on "rsa itanium ultrasparc") "RSA 1,024-bit Decryption Performance Comparison Processor Clock RSA Decryptions Frequency Per Second ItaniumTM Processor 660 MHz 1,000* Sun UltraSPARC* III 600 MHz 130** Table 1. Measured performance *Estimate of best-case performance based on theoretical analysis The Intel Itanium processor provides performance leadership in executing the public-key algorithms needed for secure e-Commerce transactions, and it does so without special hardware assistance. This is an advantage because hardware solutions are costly and increase the form factor of the total server solution. Public-key cryptography, also known as asymmetric-key cryptography, differs from symmetric-key cryptography. In symmetric-key cryptography, there is one key, and it is used by the sender for encryption and by the receiver for decryption. This approach introduces potential problems with key distribution."