Short answers, pulled from the story.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology released SHA-3 on the 5th of August 2015. This release marked the end of a multi-year competition to find an alternative to existing hash functions like SHA-1 and MD5.
Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters, and Gilles Van Assche designed the winning algorithm known as Keccak. These four researchers built upon their earlier work on RadioGatún which itself evolved from the PANAMA design created in 1998.
SHA-3 relies on a novel architecture called the sponge construction which allows any amount of data to be absorbed into an internal state before being squeezed out as output. The total state size for SHA-3 is fixed at 1600 bits arranged as a 5x5 array of words.
NIST announced changes to the capacity parameter c in early 2013 compared to the original Keccak submission to balance speed against quantum computing threats. Subsequent drafts confirmed a reversal back to the original capacity proposal for all drop-in replacement instances after significant debate among cryptographers.
Modern x86-64 machines achieve approximately 12.6 cycles per byte while specialized SIMD instructions push performance closer to six or seven cycles. OpenSSL provides multiple assembly-language versions tailored for specific platforms including AVX2 and AVX-512VL configurations that yield fifty percent improvements over generic compiler outputs on Skylake-X processors.