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by oconnor663 954 days ago
A couple reasons just on the performance side:

- SHA-256 has hardware acceleration on many platforms, but SHA-512 mostly doesn't.

- Setting aside hardware acceleration, SHA-256 is faster on 32-bit platforms, like a lot of embedded devices. If you have to choose between "fast on a desktop" vs "fast in embedded", it can make sense to assume that desktops are always fast enough and that your bottlenecks will be in embedded.
1 comments
adrian_b 953 days ago
On older 64-bit CPUs without hardware SHA-256 (i.e. up to the Skylake derivatives), SHA-512 is faster.

Many recent Arm CPUs have hardware SHA-512 (and SHA-3).

Intel will add hardware SHA-512 starting with Arrow Lake S, to be launched at the end of 2024 (the successor in desktops of the current Raptor Lake Refresh).

Most 64-bit CPUs that have been sold during the last 4 years and many of those older than that have hardware SHA-256.

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