AES-NI on Thinkpads

I'll be ordering an Edge e220s asap, but am concerned why the system service parts page lists logic boards that each do/do not support AES-NI. This worries me that if I order an i7 chip, that the system might not support AES-NI (support of AES-NI is a factor in my upgrading machines). Anyone encounter this? I asked a Lenovo chat rep and they had no idea.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-77274

 

The AES-NI resides inside the CPU. This should not be affected by what logic board is used. Or am I wrong?

 

The boards that don't support it are probably the boards with the processors that don't.

 

@ Tek-Ti: that is exactly what I understood, but am confused to see the mention of "non-AES" in #4 of the link I provided. And both CPUs for the Edge e220s (i5-2537M and i7-2617M) both support AES-NI.

Anyway, the Lenovo chat rep later told me that I can order and if it doesn't support AES-NI, they will waive the restocking fee.

 

non-AES planars with AES-NI chipsets are special-bid configurations.   i'd be very surprised if you purchased yours retail and received it without AES enabled on an AES-capable processor.

these options are usually created for government or country-specific offerings.   not all parts listed are available in every country.

 

thank you erik... that would make sense. but being in Canada, i shouldn't have an issue regarding country-specific offerings

 

While I don't think it will be an issue, keep a transcript of that chat in case you have one.

By the way, if you do use Bitlocker, I can say this from experience --using a chip with AES-NI is amazingly fast compared to one without. I'm guessing the same would be true of TrueCrypt (which supports AES-NI), but I haven't used it.

 

Yeah... I've been looking to take much of that CPU overhead away when running full disk encryption (I've been accustomed to TrueCrypt). Are you running it on your T420? Wondering how it's doing on the mSATA SSD. That was my near-term plan, though I've heard that fully encrypting an SSD essentially negates TRIM, and leads to performance degradation (though surely still better than a HDD). Any experience on that?

 

I'm running Bitlocker on a partition on my mechanical hard drive. Unlike many, I only unlock that partition when needed; I have a script to re-lock the drive when not in use.

With the T9600 CPU from my T400, Bitlocker had a noticeable delay when a folder contained multiple files, or when indexing. With the 2520M, performance is nearly what my T400 had when using a non-encrypted drive. It's close enough to realtime to not impact work performance.

My mSATA SSD is a boot and apps drive only; all data has been relocated to the mechanical hard drive. This includes browser caches, temp files, and swap file as well. For this reason, I have no reason to encrypt my boot drive.

 

You are not alone, indeed: there in Russia all of ThinkPads sold without AES-NI support for ages now. It seems like Russian's federal security service don't really welcome this feature at all! But still, Russian hackers they found the way on how to trick the system and turn this functionality on with a patched version of BIOS.

What does this mean? If you want it: get your lappy from USA or patch your BIOS.