Intel heralds new age of processing

Intel is to demonstrate an experimental computer chip with 80 separate processing engines, or cores, reports The New York Times.

Company executives say the chip provides a model for commercial chips that will be widely used in standard desktop, laptop and server computers within five years.

The Teraflop chip takes advantage of manufacturing technology that Intel introduced last month. It will be detailed in a technical paper to be presented on the opening day of the International Solid States Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week.

An alliance of all major music publishers and 23 cellphone operators will provide a music service to 690 million phone subscribers, stealing the thunder of Apple's iPhone, reports Mail & Guardian.

Initiated by British cellphone music firm Omnifone, the MusicStation service will be introduced by the second quarter, offering unlimited track downloads at EUR2.99 per week, including data traffic charges.

"We expect to definitely get to the millions of subscribers by the end of this calendar year," said Omnifone founder Rob Lewis.

Google warns that the rise of Internet video is driving the Web to a traffic jam of epic proportions and threatening to put a significant dampener on global network speeds, reports IDM.

As services such as YouTube, BitTorrent and Joost (from the creators of Skype) become more popular, the sheer volume of video data being moved from place to place is forcing the underlying Internet infrastructure to groan.

"The Web infrastructure, and even Google's [infrastructure] doesn't scale. It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect," Vincent Dureau, Google's head of TV technology, said at the recent Cable Europe Congress.