5 ms·
> Is modern encryption a challenge to those old machines? Ooooooh yeah. It's got some serious overhead on single core systems several-hundred-megahertz systems
by techrat 5y ago
> Is modern encryption a challenge to those old machines?
Ooooooh yeah. It's got some serious overhead on single core systems several-hundred-megahertz systems without the instructions that are used to accelerate encryption these days. AES is what modern CPUs use to help with that. It wasn't until Power7+ before encryption was accelerated on that class of CPUs. The latest Mac to use Power CPUs was discontinued 6 years before that.
- blibble 5y agonot sure that's right... for interactive use, compared to rendering to the display and pushing the packet out the crypto overhead is going to be minuscule
- retrac 5y agoOnce you have authenticated each other and agree to a nice symmetric cipher and exchange the keys for that, yes. Bytes, even kilobytes per second. But note the "once you have authenticated". Public key crypto is brutal number crunching and takes minutes to hours on systems of the 80s, and some noticeable seconds even in the late 90s. I think that's why something like RSA-4096 was not just universally adopted 30 years ago. It was too expensive to compute for casual use.
- blibble 5y agoeven the crappiest laptop CPU can do 10000 x 4096-bit RSA signature verifications per second my 2014 laptop (on battery, no hardware acceleration): sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 4096 bits 0.006200s 0.000096s 161.3 10468.9 (not to mention everyone's using ec these days, which is quite a bit faster)
- techrat 5y agoPower7+ came out in 2012 which was the first gen of Power CPUs to include AES acceleration. [1] The most powerful Power Macs with non Intel CPUs were discontinued in 2006. (G5, released 2003.) [2] Your laptop from 2014 was already running at LEAST a 64bit CPU and likely has AES instructions as they were introduced in 2010 [3] So even if your laptop from 2014 onward didn't include AES instructions like some Intel Atom/Celeron/Pentium models... (Acer C720P Chromebook, for example came out in 2014 and has a Intel Celeron 2955U [4] and [5]) It was still an architecture that is/was ELEVEN YEARS NEWER. A Celeron 2955U is roughly equivalent in performance to a Core 2 Duo E4700 or an AMD Athlon 64 x2 5200+ ... which is still quite ahead of a PowerMac G5. [6] and [7] TLDR: Time marches on and along with cpu improvements come instructions and other benefits not immediately visible to the end user. Try using your old 2003-era system to generate keys again and tell us how fun it is. Bonus if you try it on a Pre-2000 era Performa Mac as a user typically had with SystemOS 7, 8 and 9. Those ran at 16 to 66mhz. [8] For reference, SystemOS 7 came out in 1991. [9] OS8 came out in 1997. [10] And OS9 came out in 1999. [11] The CPUs inside the Performa Macs running System 7, OS8 and OS9, at best, can be compared to the 486s on the Intel side. Not even Pentium level. This places the architecture at LEAST a dozen architecture generations behind what you're generating keys on. This means if the CPUs we're looking at here were aged up, your laptop is starting first or second grade while the actual CPUs of the time are now finishing their masters' degrees with a kid or two on the way. Rather than naively using your extremely modern in comparison 'crappy laptop' cpu as a reference point, perhaps you should use something more typical from the time these OSes were considered relevant. TLDR to the TLDR: Get off my lawn. [1] https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_sm/5/897/ENUS9117-_h05/index.html&lang=en&request_locale=en https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G5 [3] https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/intel-advanced-encryption-standard-instructions-aes-ni.html https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/article... [4] https://www.amazon.com/Acer-C720P-2666-Chromebook-11-6-Inch-Touchscreen/dp/B00GSEOV7U https://www.amazon.com/Acer-C720P-2666-Chromebook-11-6-Inch-... [5] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/75608/intel-celeron-processor-2955u-2m-cache-1-40-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/75608/i... [6] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-2955U-vs-Intel-Core2-Duo-E4700-vs-AMD-Athlon-64-X2-Dual-Core-5200+-vs-Intel-Celeron-G3930/2073vs938vs84vs2957 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-2955U-vs-... [7] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PowerMac-Intel-KBL https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PowerMac... [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Performa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Performa [9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_8 [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_9
- blibble 5y ago> Your laptop from 2014 was already running at LEAST a 64bit CPU and likely has AES instructions as they were introduced in 2010 [3] I'm totally sure the RSA operations are using the AES instructions > Try using your old 2003-era system to generate keys again and tell us how fun it is. generating (fresh) rsa keys? you don't do that on connection to a SSH server as for what actually happens on connect, 2004 laptop: 33 signatures/second and 2200 verifications/second (+DH/ECDH) the RSA operation (verifying the server's host key) took a total of 0.0005s even my raspberry pi 1 can do 240 4096-bit verifications/s and several thousand ECDH's/second and I have yet to see a SSH server with 4096-bit host keys tldr: even old computers are fast (and data > supposition)
- techrat 5y agoTLDR: You're not using era appropriate examples. I told you to get off my lawn.
- blibble 5y agoI did exactly what you told me to I suggest reading up on how the SSH protocol works
- kalleboo 5y agoThere are people in this thread with actual experience and actual bench times using these protocols on machines of that period https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28022299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28022299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28023337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28023337
- anthk 5y agoYou must be young. The gap between 1989 and 1999 in computer terms is inmense, far more than the gap between 2010 and 2020. You could emulate a 1989 m68k Mac/Amiga on a Pentium 3 from 1999, for example with BasiliskII/UAE.
- setpatchaddress 5y agoThe 68k Macs are < 60MHz and the early PowerPCs were not a lot faster. Your 2014 laptop will run circles around them doing just about anything.
- tubularalloy 5y agoIt just occurred to me while reading this comment that people born after Intel CPUs mostly leveled out perfwise are probably peers now. That realization came hard, it came fast, and I wasn’t ready to live with that knowledge by a long shot. It was a long, long road to your 2014 laptop, friend. There was a time when division was a luxury, and desperate folk offered their firstborn for forbidden tricks to compute inverse square root. Elliptic curve, you say? You mean floating point math? Whoo-ee!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fzzzy 5y agoCmon now, intel chips didn't level off till around 2010.
- Aeolun 5y agoWe’re talking about an unoptimized 1990’s 44mhz CPU here aren’t we? How is it at all comparable to a relatively state of the art 2014 laptop?
- retrac 5y agoSince you mention EC, it uses floating point. Good ol' FLOPS is not a wholly useless metric there. The first commercial processor sold with a floating point unit integrated was the 486 in 1989. Some rough, unsourced numbers: 1984 - Cray X-MP (expensive!) 800 MFLOPS 1989 - Intel 486 @ 33 MHz 3 1993 - Pentium @ 60 MHz 10 1997 - Pentium II @ 233 MHz 200 2000 - Pentium III @ 1000 MHz 2000 2004 - Pentium 4 @ 2800 MHz 5650 2007 - Core Quad @ 2400 MHz 38400 2009 - Core i7-950 @ 3100 MHz 92820 2013 - Apple A7 (smartphone) 115000 2020 - Apple M1 2844000 A FP calculation that takes 1 second on an Apple M1 will take 11 hours on the original Pentium, approximately. Hope that gives some perspective.
- blibble 5y agoeven if it's 15000 times slower than my 2014 laptop (which it isn't): the ECDH operation still takes under a second and that's the expensive operation (done once per connection)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- retrac 5y agoI am making the same mistake that the other poster did, in assuming too much background familiarity. Those are 90s chips. This software runs on machines from the late 1980s. The trend scales further back as it does forward. Five years is always a long time in computer performance. The 486, the slowest chip on my list blasts the early Macs (which this software runs on) out of the water by 100x. I went and researched it and the the 68882 FPU at 25 MHz is about 0.25 MFLOPS: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/motorola/68k-chips-faq/ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/motorola/68k-chips-faq/ Stunning, but that is the difference between 1985 and 1989 technology.
- blibble 5y ago> I am making the same mistake that the other poster did, in assuming too much background familiarity. Those are 90s chips. This software runs on machines from the late 1980s. The trend scales further back as it does forward. my point was on interactive use (i.e. using AES or ChaCha) you are the one that diverted the topic towards RSA-4096 (which no-one uses), moving the goalposts (twice) (and yes, I saw the deleted post)
- wpearse 5y agoThis is a 68040. I had a cut down version (68LC040 — low cost) in my Mac LC475 in the mid ‘90s. You have no idea how slow it is haha.