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patchnulltoday at 3:05 PM1 replyview on HN

Current FHE on general CPUs is typically 10,000x to 100,000x slower than plaintext, depending on the scheme and operation. So even with a 5,000x ASIC speedup you are still looking at roughly 20-100x overhead vs unencrypted compute.

That rules out anything latency-sensitive, but for batch workloads like aggregating encrypted medical records or running simple ML inference on private data it starts to become practical. The real unlock is not raw speed parity but getting FHE fast enough that you can justify the privacy tradeoff for specific regulated workloads.


Replies

tromptoday at 4:23 PM

10,000x to 100,000x / 5,000x = 2 to 10x, not 20 to 100x.