by LARRY GREENEMEIER
Rather than performing serial calculations like a digital processor, Lyric Semiconductor’s probability-processing technology includes a circuit design that the company says performs probability calculations in parallel, taking up less space and using less power.
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Lyric, which has received more than $18 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to perform basic research into probability-processing technology, is also working on a programming language called Probability Synthesis to Bayesian Logic. PSBL would essentially enable a computer to offload probability-related problems to a GP5 while assigning other types of processors—central and graphics processing units, for example—to do what they do best, whether it is serving Web pages or rendering graphics. “We’re not trying to solve all problems, just probability-based problems,” Reynolds says.
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