How efficient is it now? The last time I checked, FHE required minutes of computation and gigabytes of memory to store tiny amounts of data, and since it does not hold IND-CCA, I could not find any use cases.
There are no obvious ways to improve on this work, so it is not a matter of engineering. We really do need another breakthrough result to get us closer to practicality.
That microprocessor was efficient enough for many applications of general purpose computing, but we still need Moore's law to give us a 100-fold increase in compute power to reach this level.
This level of performance seems comparable to (and IMHO slower than) the very first electronic stored-program computer, the 1948 Manchester Baby.
This can be OK for some relatively rare and important computations, which you for some reason must run in a software-untrusted environment. I can imagine using it for some high-stakes, small-scale automated voting. All the intermediate results may be posted in the encrypted form as an audit trail. After the process is completed and results are declared, the encryption keys are released, and any party can check that every step of the computation determining the winner was correct, there was no stuffing.
It's often hard to compare things in an accurate way. I mean many current methods might already have hardware specific acceleration and researchers aren't always good at optimization (why should they be?). So is the problem of FHE a bigger lack of just not enough people (specialists) putting in time to optimize it or is it so computationally intensive that we need hardware to get better before it becomes practical? I mean look at llama.cpp and how much faster it is or stable diffusion? Sure, both kinda slow (diffusion's no GAN and SD's not straight diffusion) but very usable for many applications.
No.
>Is this something that could be fixed by an accelerator?
No.
They were 50/50 on whether or not this technique could be made feasible in the same way that, say, the CKKS scheme is.