Comments on: Startup Makes Probability-Based Chips for Big Data Apps

By: Holy Smokes! At 5.2 GHz IBM Chip is Super Fast

Holy Smokes! At 5.2 GHz IBM Chip is Super Fast — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:32:10 +0000

[...] is trying to think of ways to tame it it. Others like Lyric Semiconductor, a startup making probability-based processors are looking for a different way that just brute [...]

By: crander

crander — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:48:46 +0000

Port the R language to it and get the financial guys excited!

Great opportunity for cloud providers to explore differentiating their services.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:42:35 +0000

Eddie and Michael,

Great points. I didn’t go into details here, but getting folks to sign on for using their programming protocol isn’t going to be easy.

Michael,

I would disagree with you on one topic: in the future all businesses have to be asking complex questions from their IT systems. Without that they are just not a relevant enterprise. So perhaps that is why more folks are going to need these (or these kind of) chips ;-)

By: Stan Thow

Stan Thow — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:42:01 +0000

I thought that the transistors went out like the dodo bird when Computer chips were invented.
It is so complicated that any one using this new technology will probably require a PHD. in Computer Tech. Programming and Analysis.
Its not for the average Joe.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:19:00 +0000

Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson Brain + atomic vector plotter + hot cup of tea anyone?

By: Eddie

Eddie — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:48:45 +0000

Interesting development: fuzzy chips! The tough part is not only getting new equipment purchases of the hardware, but convincing human capital (brains) to invest time into PSBL. Besides, its pretty clear that proprietary languages have problems (especially ones like PSBL that have trademarks next to their names … Oracle Java patents wars anyone?). They’ll have to get a few marquee customers which could be expensive (maybe Bernanke and the Federal Reserve will be good candidates to see if probability programming can avert the next financial crisis lol). @Michael would probably agree with me that this announcement is unlikely to stop Hadoop which is just getting warmed up!

By: Michael Driscoll

Michael Driscoll — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:31:22 +0000

While I agree that the age of big data requires probabilistic approaches, I fear Lyric may have a tough time convincing a business audience of this.

Few questions that businesses ask of their massive data — such as, “were sales significantly higher yesterday?” — rarely require operations over billions of events to produce exact counts.

Yet few executives like answers that begin with “probably…” — they want precision, even false precision.

That said, I hope these guys may succeed in proving me wrong, and save the world a lot of CPU cycles in the process.