by block i mean the same thing as they mean by shard. it just doesn't make sense to count entire amount of data processed - only amount of data processed TOGETHER make a sense

and yeah, it's quite hard to believe that some new approach may work 1000 times faster than existing ones. that said, i'm not alone - there are a few academic paper/code which is only ~10x slower than my code. i just developed better math scheme and made accurate low-level implementation