Lyric Semiconductor shows off probability processor

Bit Tech reports Lyric is working on a probability processor, a chip that can say "perhaps". The device will be known as the Lyric Error Correction chip, it will be used in solid state storage devices to cut data transmission errors to one per thousand trillion, significantly better than the estimated one in a thousand achieved by contemporary binary logic processors. Moreover, the probability processor also promises to reduce costs and power consumption.

During the interview, Vigoda described the processors as "[taking] in numbers between zero and one [...] instead of zero and one they have 'maybe.' [The] transistors are like dimmer switches."

Flying in the face of decades of traditional processor design - which relies on the simplicity of binary logic, simply adding more and more transistors to the mix to 'brute-force' solutions to increasingly complex mathematical problems - the company's probability processor allows, Vigoda claims, specific instructions to be built to solve specific tasks far more efficiently than with binary logic.