Intel Demos Chip to Compute With Encrypted Data

SummaryFully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows computing on encrypted data without decryption, but it’s currently slow on standard CPUs and GPUs.Intel’s Heracles chip accelerates FHE tasks up to 5,000 times faster than top Intel server CPUs.Heracles uses a 3-nanometer FinFET technology and high-bandwidth memory, enabling efficient encrypted computing at scale.Startups and Intel are racing to commercialize FHE accelerators, with potential applications in AI and secure data processing.Worried that your latest ask to a cloud-based AI reveals a bit too much about you? Want to know your genetic risk of disease without revealing it to the services that compute the answer?There is a way to do computing on encrypted data without ever having it decrypted. It’s called fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE. But there’s a rather large catch. It can take thousands—even tens of thousands—of times longer to compute on today’s CPUs and GPUs than simply working with the decrypted data.S