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by tedunangst 2661 days ago
Can you expand on the CPUs that support 128 bit AES but not 256 bit? I didn't know that was a possibility.
2 comments

Hmm, no, I can't.

This was something I had observed in practice over the years (i.e. several orders of magnitude performance difference between AES-128 and AES-256 from my PHP implementations), and "your CPU only supports AES-NI for 128-bit keys" was the explanation I was given at the time. I haven't observed this recently, and I'm on newer hardware, so the explanation made sense.

In attempting to identify which CPUs were affected by this limitation, I've discovered that I was grossly misinformed about this. I'm going to update the article to redact this, ASAP.

UPDATE: Redaction applied.

~10 years ago I had a small fanless computer running with an AMD Geode LX CPU that supported AES-128 but not 256 in hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geode_(processor)#Geode_LX

IIRC the geode accelerator is more like a PCI device in the same SoC and not technically a CPU extension.