Quick take based on reading of others’ work, but unless you’re a datacenter operator, there is really no need to go into full bore panic and scrap your plans in the wake of the new disclosure of hardwired flaws in Intel and other CPUs.
Performance
Computer performance optimization techniques.
Process Explorer 16.0 Adds VirusTotal Integration
Author Mark Russinovich just dropped version 16.0 of Sysinternals procexp, an indispensable utility that displays a tree view of every process on a Windows system along with its resource consumption. Procexp’s visual representation of the activity on a system is so useful for performance tuning that I not only keep an instance in my toolkit, but also place one right smack on the desktop of pretty much every machine I’m responsible for. Version 16.0 is a big feature update boasting newly added integration with cloud antivirus service VirusTotal.
A Look at the Performance Impact of Hardware-Accelerated AES
In 2010, semiconductor manufacturers began migrating the algorithmically intensive portions of the AES cipher on-die in the form of the AES-NI instruction set. Many cryptographic APIs and applications have enabled support for this new technology, and none hesitate to tout the promise of major performance improvements. Intel demonstrates 3x to 10x acceleration versus pure software implementations, while the authors of TrueCrypt set the expectation of 4x to 8x speed gains. Can these performance boosts be recognized in practice, and how much of these gains can be captured in present day, real world scenarios?
TrueCrypt 7.0 Released, Supports Hardware-Accelerated AES
A major, feature-rich update to the TrueCrypt disk encryption tool hit the wire yesterday, notably adding support for Intel’s on-die AES-NI instruction set in Westmere class processors and newer. The authors claim a juicy 4 to 8 times performance leap for hardware-accelerated AES over a pure software implementation.