Architectural Limits of Cloud TPUs in Finite-Field Cryptography

Abstract

We empirically characterise the cost-efficiency deficit between cloud Tensor Processing Units and GPUs for finite-field cryptography. Against A100 GPU baselines (cuZK), we measure a $[5{,}558\times, 6{,}908\times]$ deficit across v5p and v4 architectures under an FP32-mantissa staging discipline, and a $\sim$$4{,}693\times$ deficit using v5p's native \texttt{int32} accumulator. We analytically project this deficit into a fundamental arithmetic penalty (lacking wide-integer ALUs) and a spatial penalty. We demonstrate that evaluating concurrent multi-tenant deployments, where strict separation forces eager Montgomery reduction, yields a projected $5.19\times$ spatial collapse; relaxing this constraint theoretically recovers these spatial cycles, yet the underlying arithmetic penalty remains. To facilitate this characterisation, we deploy \codename as a measurement vehicle. By mapping low-degree polynomials onto matrix-form Number Theoretic Transforms, the scheduler stacks heterogeneous polynomials into dense 2D matrices, achieving $\sim$$100\%$ K-dimension column occupancy on uniform workloads ($>$$92\%$ on mixed-degree traces). However, despite optimal K-dimension packing, severe M-dimension under-utilisation (e.g., $6.25\%$ on v4) combined with overwhelming VPU-bound Montgomery reduction stalls mathematically starve the systolic arrays. A post-hoc HLO validator ensures these measurements remain structurally isolated against the XLA fusion engine. Our findings empirically demonstrate the structural inadequacy of AI-optimised systolic arrays for exact, high-throughput field arithmetic.