AES is normally benchmarked against other block ciphers. It might not be fair to compare the performance of a native stream cipher to that of AES rigged up as a stream cipher with CTR.
I'm still missing what makes it unfair. Are other modes of AES potentially faster? Does AES provide something that stream ciphers don't? Are Salsa20/Chacha20 unable to be compared to anything because they're native stream ciphers that look like a block cipher in CTR mode under the hood?
