Startup sets sights on probability chip

Start-up Lyric Semiconductor has developed a new chip architecture that promises to speed up the computation of big data applications, such as web search, bid analysis or genome sequencing.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) spin-off said on that it is planning to commercialise a type of chip architecture originally developed by its co-founder, Ben Vigoda, while he was a PhD student at the university. The first chips with the technology could roll out within the next 12 months, with a general purpose computing chip on the horizon for testing in 2013, according to Lyric.

The chip architecture is designed from the ground-up to handle probability processing, the company said. The probability processing technology calculates in a new way, which could lead to a big jump in processor efficiency, it said.