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

MD5 also benefits from SSE2 usage, check out BarsWF and then tell me that it doesn't. All it takes is a little assembler knowledge and you can craft your own MD5 SSE2 routine(s). For large amounts of throughput however, there is a tradeoff of the speed during hashing as opposed to the time spent rearranging the input data to be compatible with the SIMD instructions used.