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Comment by redcannon218

My benchmarks are not public, but on AMD EPYC processors ChaCha12 (5 GB / s) is faster than hardware-accelerated AES-256-GCM (3.5 GB / s).

Unfortunately, this is comparing apples to oranges because AES-256-GCM is authenticated, so you will need a MAC with ChaCha12 (usually Poly1305) which finally makes ChaCha12 in AEAD mode slower than AES-256-GCM.

But the real question is: What is fast enough?

I believe that between 1 and 2 GB / s per core for an AEAD is fast enough as I/O will be your bottleneck way before that.

This is why I will always favor a ChaCha20/ChaCha12-based AEAD over AES and its many footguns.

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