A DARPA-funded processor start-up has made bold claims about a new kind of processor that computes using probabilities, rather than the traditional ones and zeroes of conventional processors. Lyric Semiconductor, an MIT spin-off, claims that its probabilistic processors could speed up some kinds of computation by a factor of a thousand, allowing racks of servers to be replaced with small processing appliances.

Calculations involving probabilities have a wide range of applications. Many spam filters, for example, work on the basis of probability; if an e-mail contains the word "Viagra" it's more likely to be spam than one which doesn't, and with enough of these likely-to-be-spam words, the filter can flag the mail as being spam with a high degree of confidence. Probabilities are represented as numbers between 0, impossible, and 1, certain. A fair coin toss has a probability of 0.5 of coming up heads.

May 23, 2012 -- Web host ServInt announced on Tuesday night at the Web Host Industry Review networking event that it is now taking orders for hosting services in its new data center in Amsterdam.

Ars conducts an unscientific test of the ice cream innovators' cookbook.

Angry Anons may be behind the attack.

New GPUs also triple speed for high-performance computing