> That's because the vast majority of power in processors today is spent transferring information, not computing arithmetic operations. As an aside: I found th

> That's because the vast majority of power in processors today is spent transferring information, not computing arithmetic operations. As an aside: I found this aspect (and the amount of dark silicon in modern CPUs) very interesting when watching Simon Knowles talk on their graph core design. They try to reduce this cost, maximise compute and minimise dark silicon by using a far more localised memory architecture (granted what they are doing is naturally more parallel than a CPU though). I think you are correct when thinking about dropping this into a normal CPU design as a bolt on discrete block of logic... but perhaps it's better used as a hardware building block for specialised processing. i.e rather than exposing it as an actual instruction on its own, use it as the building block of an algorithm implemented in hardware that requires really fast arithmetic but does not need to be perfectly deterministic (with no back and forth to registers until the end result) keep in mind it truly can be fast inside a single clock because fixed length streams (i.e words) can be processed in parallel. I guess in short i'm saying: avoid the serialisation process until necessary, chain the probabilistic arithmetic until done _then_ do the expensive de-serialisation. My intuition tells me it would have value then, but I don't know.