The value is not about performance, but security. Crypto done by modern CPUs is susceptible to many side-channel attacks. Having a separate SoC is nice, but the

The value is not about performance, but security. Crypto done by modern CPUs is susceptible to many side-channel attacks. Having a separate SoC is nice, but the SoC is not upgradable with new algorithms or patches if there are any problems found in its implementation. Also, just having a separate memory space for the purpose of computation is not sufficient. I'm arguing for an entirely separate hardware bus to load keys onto the chip, such that they never exist in CPU, memory, or the storage for the machine being used for general purpose computation, because keys there can be obtained via side-channels if other software (such as the kernel) is exploited.