Advantage of special instructions

I ever wondered the need for special instructions added by Intel into its already bulky CPU instruction set, for example, the AES instructions. Recently, I enable the FileVault2 fracture of my 2011 15' MBP, before that, of course, I do some research about the performance impact and find this article: FileVault 2 Benchmarks Show Full Disk Encryption is Faster Than Ever in OS X Lion. Pay attention to the difference of performance impact on MacBook of 2010(core duo, without AES Instruction set) and 2011(i7, with AES instruction set), you can see that AES instructions help out here.
One real world example is always stronger than the assertion in textbook.

2 books about BIOS

Recently, in one TOI related to BIOS, one experienced BIOS engineer recommendsBeyond BIOS to us, who don't write BIOS code, but need to know something about it. It proves that there are still books about BIOS, so I do some search through Google and find another one: BIOS Disassembly Ninjutsu Uncovered, which also dive into this topic deeply.
The 2 books are both out of sale from Amazon, especially the latter is in unreasonably high price from some sellers, but one good news is that it is freed by its author for free download here.