Laser puts record data rate through fibre   Light escaping from optical fibre Fibres operating in the infrared can shuttle many different colours of light down their lengths Continue reading the main story Researchers have set a new record for the rate of data transfer using a single laser: 26 terabits per second. At those speeds, the entire Library of Congress collections could be sent down an optical fibre in 10 seconds. The trick is...

Flexible phone made from electronic paper to debut   A prototype flexible smartphone made of electronic paper has been created by Canadian researchers. The PaperPhone can do all the things bulkier smartphones can do such as make and take calls, send messages, play music or display e-books. The gadget triggers different functions and features when bent, folded and flexed at its corners or sides. “Everything is going to look and...

Intel unveils 22nm 3D Ivy Bridge processor Traditional planar chip design (left) and Intel’s new Tri-Gate technology (right). The company believes that 3D transistors perform more efficiently   Intel has unveiled its next generation of microprocessor technology, code named Ivy Bridge. The upcoming chips will be the first to use a 22 nanometre manufacturing process, which packs transistors more densely than the current 32nm...

Where next for high end graphics?   Speculation about the death of the high end graphics card is a popular pastime these days, and with good reason. Want a vision of the GPU apocalypse that keeps AMD and Nvidia executives awake at night? Compare ‘Radeon HD 6990′ with ‘Angry Birds‘ in Google Trends, a tool which measures the popularity of search terms over time. Proportionally, the number of people actively...

Intel: ‘We could easily have CPUs with hundreds of cores’   It’s almost 40 years since Intel released its first CPU, the 4004, a ground-breaking processor that crammed all the computing power of ENIAC – the first general purpose computer – into a tiny silicon chip. Of course, what was impressive in 1971 looks, well, rather less spectacular today. And now the Intel 4004 is most useful as an example of just...

What will we connect our kit with in the future? Intel’s Light Peak promised fibre-optic, 100Gbps connections. For now, though, it’s copper and 10Gbps. The Thunderbolt connections in new MacBook Pros are impressive, but they could have been even better: Thunderbolt is Intel’s Light Peak technology, which was supposed to use fibre-optic wiring. For now, though, it’s plain old copper. In the longer term, Light Peak...