I would hope that they provide sufficient carryless multiply support so that _ANY_ crc polynomial can be efficiently implemented (not to mention fast error corr

I would hope that they provide sufficient carryless multiply support so that _ANY_ crc polynomial can be efficiently implemented (not to mention fast error correcting codes and the great many other things that can be done with fast GF(2^n) arithmetic). There is no one optimal CRC choice, the best CRC will depend on the error model of your channel and the lengths of the data that you're processing.