[PeterisP]

The benchmarks listed there are approximately 100 times slower than the original Intel 8088 microprocessor released 1979 on which the original IBM PC was based.

That microprocessor was efficient enough for many applications of general purpose computing, but we still need Moore's law to give us a 100-fold increase in compute power to reach this level.

This level of performance seems comparable to (and IMHO slower than) the very first electronic stored-program computer, the 1948 Manchester Baby.

[nine_k]

In other words, this can be compared to do the computation manually, but with the guarantee that whoever is performing the computation cannot glean anything from it.

This can be OK for some relatively rare and important computations, which you for some reason must run in a software-untrusted environment. I can imagine using it for some high-stakes, small-scale automated voting. All the intermediate results may be posted in the encrypted form as an audit trail. After the process is completed and results are declared, the encryption keys are released, and any party can check that every step of the computation determining the winner was correct, there was no stuffing.

[nextaccountic]

This will be used to do DRM. Media conglomerates are obsessed with the idea of not letting users control the software they run on their computers