Benchmark for SHA-3 (Shake128)
Cycles per byte means the number of CPU cycles that must elapse in order to process a single byte of input for a specific processor. A CPU's clock frequency determines how many cycles per second the processor is running at (for example, 2.6 billion per second for a 2.6 GHz processor). Note that this is a rather crude type of benchmark, because the bottleneck may not be waiting for each instruction to retire. Memory access latency, shared resources, etc. can slow things down.