Intel unveiled Heracles, a purpose-built chip for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) that achieves 1,074 to 5,547x speedups over a top-tier Intel Xeon server CPU. Built on Intel's 3nm FinFET process and paired with 48GB of high-bandwidth memory, Heracles features 64 SIMD compute cores arranged in an 8x8 grid and runs three synchronized instruction streams to balance data movement and computation. A live demo at ISSCC showed a private ballot verification query completing in 14 microseconds versus 15 milliseconds on a Xeon—translating to 23 minutes versus 17 days for 100 million ballots. Developed under a DARPA program over five years, Heracles is the largest FHE research chip built to date. Competitors including Niobium Microsystems, Fabric Cryptography, Cornami, and Optalysys are racing to commercialize FHE accelerators, with Niobium announcing a $6.9M deal with Semifive to fabricate its chip on Samsung's 8nm process. Intel has no stated commercial plans but intends to continue improving Heracles through software tuning and hardware iteration.
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