One interesting thing is that modern processors have an AES instruction set [1] integrated into them so that primitive AES operations can be individually called

One interesting thing is that modern processors have an AES instruction set [1] integrated into them so that primitive AES operations can be individually called and accelerated in hardware. You can run these instructions from C and it significantly speeds up the AES algorithm compared to writing out the algorithm explicitly in C. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set