I was over the moon today to see Jonathan Schwartz blog the latest organisational announcement. Not just because of the transparency and openness it demonstrates, but also one of the reasons given for forming the Microelectronics group is "investing in cryptography".

The UltraSPARC T1 processor that we first shipped with the T1000/T2000 machines has some very cool modular exponentiation logic in it which makes it possible to implement a hardware-assisted RSA/DSA implementation that is really fast. "No big deal", you say - "PCI cards have been doing it that way for a while"?

Well roll on Niagara 2, due later this year, where we add AES, 3DES, RC4, SHA1, SHA256, MD5 to that list - all done in hardware and all on a CMT processor.

Niagara 2 also brings us hardware randomness from the chip as well.

Now I don't personally know the future of our hardware crypto products beyond this at the moment, but I hope that the investment in the new Microelectronics group will allow us to go even further in this area. When I know more that I can share I'll share it here. There is some stuff I want to share with you about Rock but I need to get my head around it before I'm ready to share.

tags: crypto microelectronics niagara