Calculating probabilities is an increasingly critical and commonplace computing task--key to things such as financial modeling, fraud detection and target marketing--and a new processor system from startup Lyric Semiconductor aims to make the task faster and cheaper. The company wants to give rival giants, Intel and AMD, a run for their money, reports Jeffrey Burt at eWeek.

The binary nature of traditional computing--using 0s and 1s to arrive at yes or no answers--is not the most efficient model for discovering odds, Lyric maintains. Processors that conduct probability calculations today take up large amounts of power and space. The calculating circuitry unveiled by Lyric, which was funded by VC firms and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, would take only a few processors while others could take hundreds, Burt writes.   

As Ashlee Vance at The New York Times reports, Lyric's technology provides a potential advantage for the Department of Defense in pinpointing useful information in vast streams of data. The company's approach resembles that of other niche chip players, like Nvidia, which developed a chip that improved the speed of nuclear weapons simulations.

For more:
- see Jeffrey Burt's article at eWeek
- see Ashlee Vance's article at The New York Times

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