Yes, SHA-NI helps a lot. There are a lot of Skylake and even Haswell systems still out there, though, depending on deployment intent and, as you note, several o

Yes, SHA-NI helps a lot. There are a lot of Skylake and even Haswell systems still out there, though, depending on deployment intent and, as you note, several old and slow implementations using the reference code. Skylake, Haswell, and even Ivy/Sandy Bridge benefit a lot from SSE4/AVX implementations, with such SHA-1 implementations still faster than MD5 (if not SHA-256). The author talks about Java a lot and I honestly don’t know whether OpenJDK et al use for crypto primitive implementations (hopefully OpenSSL!). BLAKE3 is not multithreaded by default.