Lawrence Spracklen's Blog

One interesting benefit of using the UltraSPARC T2 hardware cryptographic accelerators is that many traditional side-channel attacks are impossible.

For instance, many cache-based attacks are not feasible, and a number of timing attacks are also thwarted.

While this immunity can be achieved in software, there is typically a significant performance penalty involved. With the hardware crypto accelerators, not only is immunity to many potential attacks achieved, but vastly improved performance is also delivered.

I will try and post more details on my reasoning shortly.