3 ms·
microcolonel was interested for an ISA extension rather than software implementation.
by dependenttypes 6y ago
microcolonel was interested for an ISA extension rather than software implementation.
- brandmeyer 6y agoISA extensions cover quite a lot of ground. One design point is to implement a very narrowly scoped accelerator that only addresses the highest latency (or lowest work-per-instruction) parts of a software implementation. Both Chacha and Poly1305 were specifically designed for fast execution in software implementations, so IMO this approach is well-suited to those algorithms. You could easily argue that the ARMv7-M instruction "unsigned multiply accumulate accumulate long" exists solely as a bignum accelerator, for example. Perhaps fusing addition with xor is similarly worthwhile for ChaCha.