BLAKE2, an improved version of the SHA-3 finalist BLAKE optimized for speed (opens in new tab)

Password hashes and general-purpose crypto hashes are not the same thing. If it helps, try using the technical term for the kinds of functions cryptography offers for password hashing: key derivation functions (KDFs).

To expand on what has already been noted: a good place for fast hashing is when you're using hashing millions of objects. For example, if I wanted to parse thousands of feeds and store items using a unique hash as their key, I'd want a fast hash that's collision resistant (for the uniqueness part) and one that's fast (for the millions of objects). With password hashing (KDFs, as tptacek noted), the collision resistance is useful, but we want to keep it fairly slow to avoid being able to brute force attacks.

Slow hashing is usually bad, except for password-derivation functions.

fast hashing is bad for storing one way functions of passwords because it makes them easier to attack and make many guesses about the original value from the transformed value, hence all the noise about using slow "key derivation functions" instead. for all other common use cases, faster is better, all else equal.

SHA-3 competition is over, Keccak won, so no.

The last system where I used SHA-256 had 16KiB of RAM (and 128KiB of direct-mapped flash). Yes, memory use for security algorithms is important.

I think of reduced memory requirements as a benefit to every application, including encryption. That's because nearly every application I use competes for memory; I also use memory as general storage media for stuff for which I want fast I/O and/or don't need to save permanently (e.g. mfs or tmpfs mounts). I think of memory as a precious resource.

Think smart cards.

> Even $150 notebooks come with 1 gig of ram.

The issue is with the processor's cache memory, which is small, typically 64 kiB or so. (The TLB cache is also important.) Even a few hundred bytes savings can give an important improvement in speed amd power consumption.

I agree that it looks odd. However, especially in applications like cryptography, I think that removing the ambiguity of "megabyte" (i.e. do we mean 10^6 or 2^20 bytes?) is worth the introduction of a new term.

as other people pointed out, Mebibyte is the correct form. You can't just make the wrong version right by means of usage.