laughable silicon amount waste on such "acceleration"
my conclusion: stay with software-based AES/SHA.
uh... really?
from tomshardware (on Networked Storage Devices that do AES encryption in SOFTWARE instead of HARDWARE):
Intel’s addition AES-NI to its 32 nm Clarkdale-based Core i5 desktop CPUs, six-core Gulftown processors, and second-gen Core i5 and Core i7 chips impressively demonstrates how much dedicated acceleration hardware can increase the speed of the encryption/decryption process.
-----
Nevertheless, it must be said that the encryption performance [of these NAS devices] leaves a lot of room for improvement. The implementation of a dedicated hardware cryptography unit would affect the data transfer rates very positively. Intel’s dual-core Atom D510 offers modest performance in everyday use, but for this type of encryption task, it is simply underwhelming, in turn affecting the data transfer rates. Maybe AES-NI has value in the embedded market; hopefully Intel has something planned there.