BIP32 HD Wallets: HMAC vs. "just" Hashing the Seed In A. Antonopoulus' Mastering Bitcoin (2nd edition) on page 106, there is a nice illustration showing how the basis for a BIP32 HD Wallet is generated:



So here is the one thing I don't understand about it:

In the middle of the picture there is the part where the seed is HMACed and stretched to 512 bits. Why is there a HMAC needed instead of just simply taking a hash of the seed (SHA512)?

As far as I understand, the difference between a hash and an HMAC is that the HMAC delivers some sort of non-repudiation namely that only the ones who are able to create a valid HMAC are the ones knowing a specific key (so kind of like a signature). This feature however is useless in the given use case.

So why HMAC-SHA512 instead of SHA512? Is the idea to artificially increase the workload needed for the generation of a HD Wallet to limit the possibilites of a brute-force attack?
I found this answer by David Schwartz under the cryptography tags in stackexchange, it may answer your question: HMAC . It basically states that HMAC is smaller in size and takes less CPU to compute.