To be clear, "benchmarks are nothing but lies" is an exaggeration to get my point across. (And a good way to get a laugh at the start of a talk.) But take a loo

To be clear, "benchmarks are nothing but lies" is an exaggeration to get my point across. (And a good way to get a laugh at the start of a talk.) But take a look at Figure 3 from the Performance section of the BLAKE3 spec: https://i.imgur.com/smGHAKA.png https://i.imgur.com/smGHAKA.png. Even ignoring things like caching and compiler settings and different hardware, that's a complicated graph! The lines cross all over each other. I count 5 different functions in that graph that are, for at least some input, the "fastest hash function". (I think BLAKE2sp just baaarely passes below BLAKE2bp, just prior to 8 KiB.) It's hard to give a simple summary of a complicated picture. For the big red bar chart at the top of the BLAKE3 repo, we certainly cherry-picked a point where BLAKE3 looks good. But you could also cherry-pick points where it looks bad.