Hopefully they're updated for the new post-quantum algorithms.
Which would you rather have: some fixed-function unit shared between all cores (load balancing? what if you're suddenly doing crypto stuff on many cores?), or the general-purpose tools for running any algorithm on any core?
AES isn't really threatened by quantum computing AFIK
And most encryption is to use "something" to get an AES key and then us that to decrypt data.
And that "something" (e.g. RSA/ECC based approaches) is what is threatened by quantum computing. But it's also not overly problematic if that "something" becomes slower to compute as it's done "only" once per-"a bunch of data".
AFIK the situation is similar for signing, as you don't sign the data itself normally but instead sign a hash of it and I think the hashing algorithms mostly used are not threatened by quantum computing either.
hm, which AES? AES-128 is getting a bit tight already for multi-target attacks.
As to quantum, it looks like practical serial or parallel application of Grover's algorithm might still be decades away.
But that is with current knowledge, and who knows what other breakthroughs will be made.
Wrt algorithms, it really is an implementation detail of how flexible they make the crypto engines.
The number of crypto units would be SKU specific depending on the workload. A server box doing service mesh would need one per concurrent flow presumably.
The thing that accelerator offload gets you is an additional thermal budget to spend on general purpose workloads. If you know that you will be doing SERDES, and enc/dec, offloading those to an accelerator frees up watts of TDP (thermal design power) to spend other places. This is also why we see big/little architectures, the OOO processors suck up a lot of power. In-order cores are just fine for latency insensitive workloads.
Most crypto beyond the initial key exchange is symmetric (AES, ChaCha) and those are still resistant to quantum attacks (well beyond the brute force search speed ups). Post-quantum key exchange is fast enough that it doesn't need dedicated units, unless you're in some super constrained environments. But in that case you'll run into other issues too.
