Cryptography is every download you ever do in a browser, bitlocker or equivalent encrypted disk access. Add to that gzip or brotli compression (common in HTTP). Hardware decoders for newer video codecs (such as AV1) are not that common (less than 50% of devices) so most youtube watch time on desktops/laptops is software decoding. It's a lot more than 1%.
> Cryptography is every download you ever do in a browser, bitlocker or equivalent encrypted disk access
For IO bandwidth-bound heavy lifting these things typically use AES algorithm. The hardware support for that algorithm is widely available inside CPU cores for more than a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set#x86_archit... That hardware support is precisely what enabled widespread use of HTTPS or full disk encryption. Before AES-NI it was too slow, or it required specialized accelerator chips found in web servers in 2000-s who needed to encrypt/decrypt HTTPS traffic.
I don’t think people use AVX2 or AVX512 for AES because AES-NI is way faster. The runtime dispatch needs just a few implementations: hardware-based AES to use on 99% of the computers, and couple legacy SSE-only versions.
The original AES-NI (which were SSE instructions) and also their initial correspondent in AVX performed 128-bit operations.
Later, 256-bit AES instructions were introduced, but significantly later than AVX2. Such 256-bit AES instructions, which double the AES throughput, are available in more recent CPUs, like AMD Zen 3 and Intel Alder Lake (the so-called VAES instructions).
Some of the more recent CPUs with AVX-512 support have added 512-bit AES instructions, for an extra doubling of the AES throughput.
Zen 5 (desktop and server) doubles the AES throughput in comparison with Zen 4, similarly with the double throughput for other vector operations.
In conclusion, on x86 CPUs there are many alternatives for AES, which have different throughputs: 128-bit SSE instructions since Westmere, 128-bit AVX instructions since Sandy Bridge, 256-bit VAES AVX instructions since Zen 3 and Alder Lake and 512-bit AVX-512 instructions since Ice Lake, but only in the CPUs with AVX-512 support.
