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> Heracles, which sped up FHE computing tasks as much as 5,000-fold compared to a top-of the-line Intel server CPU.

That is nice speed-up compared to generic hardware but everyone probably wants to know how much slower it is than performing same operations on plain text data? I am sure 50% penalty is acceptable, 95% is probably not.

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There are applications that are currently doing this without hardware support and accepting much worse than 95% performance loss to do so.

This hardware won’t make the technique attractive for ALL computation. But, it could dramatically increase the range of applications.

Agreed. When I was working on TEEs/confidential computing, just about everyone agreed that FHE was conceptually attractive (trust the math instead of trusting a hardware vendor) but the overhead of FHE was so insanely high. Think 1000x slowdowns turning your hour-long batch job into something that takes over a month to run instead.

Now we know why Intel more or less abandonned SEAL and rejected GPU requests.

It's Microsoft who did the library, damn, I can't understand how I misremembered that after working on it for a few months last year.

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