Is calculating an MD5 hash less CPU intensive than SHA family functions?

Question

Is calculating an MD5 hash less CPU intensive than SHA-1 or SHA-2 on \"standard\" laptop x86 hardware? I\'m interested in general information, not specific to a certain chip

Answer 1

On my 2012 MacBook Air (Intel Core i5-3427U, 2x 1.8 GHz, 2.8 GHz Turbo), SHA-1 is slightly faster than MD5 (using OpenSSL in 64-bit mode):

$ openssl speed md5 sha1
OpenSSL 0.9.8r 8 Feb 2011
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
md5              30055.02k    94158.96k   219602.97k   329008.21k   384150.47k
sha1             31261.12k    95676.48k   224357.36k   332756.21k   396864.62k

Update: 10 months later with OS X 10.9, SHA-1 got slower on the same machine:

$ openssl speed md5 sha1
OpenSSL 0.9.8y 5 Feb 2013
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
md5              36277.35k   106558.04k   234680.17k   334469.33k   381756.70k
sha1             35453.52k    99530.85k   206635.24k   281695.48k   313881.86k

Second update: On OS X 10.10, SHA-1 speed is back to the 10.8 level:

$ openssl speed md5 sha1
OpenSSL 0.9.8zc 15 Oct 2014
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
md5              35391.50k   104905.27k   229872.93k   330506.91k   382791.75k
sha1             38054.09k   110332.44k   238198.72k   340007.12k   387137.77k

Third update: OS X 10.14 with LibreSSL is a lot faster (still on the same machine). SHA-1 still comes out on top:

$ openssl speed md5 sha1
LibreSSL 2.6.5
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
md5              43128.00k   131797.91k   304661.16k   453120.00k   526789.29k
sha1             55598.35k   157916.03k   343214.08k   489092.34k   570668.37k