CPU-only enclaves force small, quantized models and high cost

Memory limits required 4-bit quantization, and the quantized model scored 51.4% on zero-shot MMLU. CPU inference cost 21.7 times as much per token as GPU inference, and the enclave roughly doubled the CPU cost ¹. The authors wrote that H100 confidential computing had no multi-GPU support ¹. NVIDIA's white paper of August 2025 describes a protected-PCIe mode that passes all eight GPUs of a Hopper HGX node to one confidential VM, with NVLink traffic unencrypted ².