What comes after the Central Processing Unit (CPU), the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), the Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)?

Start-up Lyric Semiconductor Inc. says it’ll be a fifth non-digital architecture that it’s inventing called the GP5.

The GP5 is a chip, well, maybe more of a co-processor, meant to embody some magic called probability processing that’s supposed to change today’s processing performance and power consumption by serious orders-of-magnitude. It could reduce the power and space currently demanded by data centers by 10x.

The GP5 is supposed to make an educated guess about exactly what you want when you’re searching the web and calculate the odds of you paying for it with a bogus credit card.

It’s supposed to be a God send for spam filtering, genome sequencing, financial modeling and separating the noise from the real communications traffic among would be terrorists, which is why DARPA, the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, and its ilk put $18 million into Lyric, an MIT spin-out that just surfaced this week.

Lyric says its approach fits any application that involves simultaneously considering many possible alternatives and deciding the best guess for the answer, and those apps are growing in number. Google, needless to say, has hired all the probability experts it can find.

Modern algorithms and the biggest of modern computers are being used to make educated guesses but conventional digital processors aren’t very good at it. They’re inefficient and need huge amounts of processing overhead that cost a lot of space, power and money to do it.

Lyric promises to improve on old-style digital computing with performance gains of 1,000x better than the current x86 widgetry from Intel and AMD. In other words, deliver the processing power of 1,000 servers in a single chip.

Between MIT and the four-year-old Lyric, the new way of calculating has been more than 10 years in the making, but the GP5 doesn’t exist yet – at least not in any commercial form. Lyric does hint about “transitioning the technology into some cool James Bond-type applications” for the government the past year but it doesn’t expect to be sampling a commercial dingus until 2013.

The GP5 will run code written in Lyric’s own probability programming language called PSBL, short for Probability Synthesis to Bayesian Logic, an expressive computer programming language for working with probability-based computations. PSBL will be released in the fourth quarter of this year so Lyric and the GP5 can start gathering an ecosystem.

Meanwhile, as a revenue-generating test bed, the first commercial application of Lyric’s probability processing will be Error Correction for flash memory where currently one in every thousand bits stored in a flash memory comes out wrong when the memory is read and where, with the next, denser generation of flash, a scarier one bit in every hundred will be wrong.

Lyric means to remedy this situation, cut errors to 1 bit in every 1,000 trillion and at the same time cut flash’s die size by 30x and improve its power consumption by 12x at a higher throughput than current digital solutions. It could save everybody involved billions of dollars. Widget makers, for one, will be able to offer more storage at lower costs.

It’s got a proof-of-concept processing circuit – fabbed by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation – that it launched at the Flash Memory Summit this week. The Error Correction technology is available for license along with the support services that Lyric thinks can turn into silicon for any licensee in 12 months. The company expects to close three deals this quarter, presumably with flash memory makers.

Lyric’s magic rests on the development of a new kind of logic gate circuit that uses transistors like dimmer switches rather than like classic on/off switches. These circuits can accept inputs and calculate outputs that are between 0 and 1, directly representing probabilities or levels of certainty. A modern digital processor steps through these operations serially. Lyric’s processors are meant to run probability computations in parallel.

Lyric says it can do with a mere handful of transistors what conventionally takes 500 transistors.

Redesigning processing circuits from the ground up to process probabilities natively – from the gate circuits to the processor architecture to the programming language – is how Lyric is supposed to cut down the thousand conventional processors that many applications need to just one Lyric processor and fetch its 1,000x savings in cost, power and size.

Lyric was started by CEO Ben Vigoda, who thought the widgetry up, and VP of product development David Reynolds and is backed by over $20 million from DARPA and other agencies as well as investments from chairman of the board Ray Stata, founder of Analog Devices and lead partner of Stata Venture Partners.

Lyric expects to hit profitability without more investment; the GP5′s further development will evidently be funded by revenues. The start-up holds 50 fundamental patent filings in probability processing and currently employs 30 people.