Lyric unveils probability processors
Lyric's research has culminated in the probability processor - a chip that can say "perhaps."
In a video interview with tech news site V3.co.uk, company founder Ben Vigoda revealed details of his company's planned "probability processor," which dispenses with the black-and-white world of binary logic for a series of ever-shifting greys.
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.
The company's research will come to fruition in a product known as the "Lyric Error Correction chip," a processor for solid-state storage devices which aims to cut data transmission errors to one per thousand trillion - down from the estimated one in a thousand achievable with current binary logic processors.
As well as improving data transmission quality, Vigoda claims that the reduced complexity of the probability processor means companies can "cut the size and cost of the silicon, reduce the power consumption [by] twelve times, and still get your data faster."
Beyond the LEC, Lyric - an MIT spin-off - is looking to produce a more general purpose probability processor - and, while Lyric Semiconductor isn't looking to replace CPUs with PPUs just yet, the company is hoping that its probability processors will become an essential component of modern motherboards in much the same way as math co-processors were before becoming integrated into the CPU.
Can you imagine a world where processors are able to answer "maybe" to a question, or is Lyric on a hiding to nothing with its probability processing technology? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyAnyway, I'll only believe in these "maybe" when I see them in action.
You're thinking of the improbability drive perhaps? Bring it on!
1) Why are AMD and Intel not advertising the same developments?
2) Why has Lyric not been purchased by a bigger player yet?
Haven't seen one using wire-bonding for ages...just a prototype, right?
My guess would be
1) Because it required years of research by MIT physicists to make this feasible and will require years more to make it work. Intel and AMD would need to hire specialist teams and give them an R&D budget of astronomical proportions just to catch up.
2) If you had a product which you envisioned being in every PC in the world in 10 years' time, you wouldn't sell your company for any amount of money, especially if you're already backed by a massively wealthy institution like MIT.
To me, this sounds like the first really different path in Computing in a long time. It also seems like a stepping stone to programming for quantum computing whenever the hardware gets here. If they can make this work then I think it will be a major evolutionary step in computing.
Might even be able to run Crysis on full!
...'Look at me, brain the size of a planet and all you ask me to do is play Crysis'...