Intel showcases Heracles chip, enabling data to be computed without decryption

IT Home reported on March 12 that technology media outlet Tom’s Hardware published a blog post yesterday (March 11), saying that at last month’s International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Intel demonstrated a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) acceleration chip called “Heracles.”

Citing information from the blog post, IT Home notes that modern encryption technologies typically can only protect data at rest or in transit. Once the data enters the CPU or GPU for processing, it must be decrypted into plaintext, which makes the core computing phase highly vulnerable to attacks.

To address this security gap, Intel has introduced the Heracles acceleration chip, designed specifically for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). It can directly ingest encrypted data, complete computation while keeping it in encrypted form, and output encrypted results—thereby ensuring security across the entire data lifecycle.

Fully homomorphic encryption is a type of cryptography that allows computation to be performed directly on encrypted data. After decryption, the result of the computation matches what you would get by operating directly on the original data, which is known as the “Holy Grail” in the encryption world.

Heracles is not a general-purpose x86 processor. It cannot run a standard operating system; instead, it has been completely rearchitected to meet the complex mathematical requirements of FHE.

At the ISSCC conference, Intel revealed that the chip runs at 1.20 GHz. In seven typical FHE workload tests, processing speed reached 1074x to 5547x that of 24-core Intel Xeon W7-3455 processors (operating frequency 2.50 GHz - 4.80 GHz).

Source of images: Intel

At the level of the technical architecture, Heracles uses an 8192-lane SIMD computation engine, consisting of an 8×8 tiled grid array made up of 64 tile-pairs. Each tile integrates arithmetic units optimized specifically for modular addition, modular subtraction, modular multiplication, and number-theoretic transforms (NTT).

To support massive data throughput, Intel equips the chip with 48GB of HBM3 memory. Internal bandwidth reaches several TB/s. In addition, the chip also includes a 64MB scratchpad temporary memory and a large register file stack, ensuring that data can stay close to the compute cores with extremely low latency.

Based on the specifications, the Heracles chip has an area of 197 mm and is manufactured using Intel 3 process nodes. Its peak performance reaches 29.5 TOPS when executing butterfly primitives, and 9.8 TOPS for modular arithmetic operations.

Due to the heat dissipation demands brought by high integration and high performance, the chip’s current power consumption is about 176W, and it uses a liquid-cooling solution for heat dissipation. Heracles is currently installed in standard servers in the form of a PCIe acceleration card, supporting multiple mainstream FHE encryption schemes such as BGV, BFV, and CKKS.