In the following speed table, the "bytes" column is the number of message bytes being authenticated. Numbers in columns after that are single-core cycles/byte on various microarchitectures (with overclocking disabled), so smaller numbers are better.

The "auth q1", "iqm", and "q3" columns are first quartile, interquartile mean, and third quartile of many cycle-count measurements for message authentication divided by the number of message bytes. The "verify q1", "iqm", and "q3" columns are for verifying an authenticator. The "exp auth" and "exp verify" columns show separate measurements of lib1305 after an experimental pre-configuration mv skipcompilers/* compilers step (which is unsupported: it uses instructions not supported by valgrind).

Each cycle count includes cycle-counting overhead. This overhead is typically around 40 cycles on Intel/AMD CPUs, accounting for about 4 cycles/byte for 11-byte messages, or about 0.3 cycles/byte for 139-byte messages.

Microarchitectures are listed in reverse chronological order of when they were introduced.

In the lib1305 distribution, command/lib1305-speed.c measures lib1305; benchmarks/*-* is the output of lib1305-speed on various machines; and autogen/md-speed extracts the table from those measurements. See the full output files for differences between multiple measurements and the interquartile mean.