The change caused the device struct to be copied for each expression evaluation, and caused, e.g., a 10% regression in the TensorFlow multinomial op on GPU:
Benchmark Time(ns) CPU(ns) Iterations
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BM_Multinomial_gpu_1_100000_4 128173 231326 2922 1.610G items/s
VS
Benchmark Time(ns) CPU(ns) Iterations
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BM_Multinomial_gpu_1_100000_4 146683 246914 2719 1.509G items/s