At first blush, it sounds like this kind of hardware would be extremely useful in data compression, specifically entropy encoding. LZMA, for example, applies a

At first blush, it sounds like this kind of hardware would be extremely useful in data compression, specifically entropy encoding. LZMA, for example, applies a probability prediction to each bit. Any type of data compression could probably make use of a "probability engine," which would be a huge boon for anything that deals with data. If every device could encode/decode data an order of magnitude faster, more aggressive compression could be added to everything: movies, music, HTML, voice communication. "...has received more than $20 million in government funding from DARPA and other agencies..." I'd also speculate that cryptographic implementations could benefit from this sort of technology, although I'm not very familiar with the inner workings of AES, etc. Maybe that explains their DARPA funding. Further, it's my understanding that one of the primary limitations of GPGPU processing (and parallelism in general) are the large performance penalties involved when dealing with branching, severely limiting the use of flow control. Perhaps it would be possible to offload these instructions to a probability processor, alleviating some of the slowdown in regards to flow control. Or maybe I've just read too much science fiction.