Commodity hardware performance in AES processing

Specialized encryption processors offer both low latency and high throughput at the expense of higher cost. A modern x86 system that encompasses several compute architectures (SISD/SIMD) might be able to perform well compared to a dedicated encryption unit at the fraction of the cost. This paper presents how one might accelerate AES ECB 128 bit using modern commodity hardware found in today's x86 computers. Focus architecture is AMD A6 5400K, coupled with a discrete GPU AMD R7 250. Benchmark results compare CPU OpenSSL execution, CPU AES-NI acceleration, integrated, discrete GPU and heterogeneous combinations of the above processing units. We present multiple test results and attempt to explain some inconsistencies of what would be expected.