Wired News Report 09:00 AM Jun, 20, 2006

IBM has built a transistor that runs about 100 times faster than those found in current chips, a development that could pave the way for ultra-fast computers and wireless networks, the computing giant said on Monday.

Transistors are the basic building blocks of the processors found in everything from supercomputers to digital music players, and IBM achieved the record speeds by building one from silicon laced with the exotic chemical element germanium.

The transistor enabled a processor speed of 500 gigahertz, which is more than 100 times the speed of the fastest PC chips sold today, and about 250 times faster than the typical mobile telephone chip, said Bernie Meyerson, head of semiconductor research for IBM. That speed was hit only when IBM researchers, working with counterparts from the Georgia Institute of Technology, cooled the transistor to near absolute zero, but Meyerson said the device still ran at 300 gigahertz at room temperature.

Clay Ryder, president of Sageza Group, a technology market research firm, said the breakthrough should lead to faster processors, but ones that will run far below the top speed demonstrated by IBM. Most improvements in chip speeds over the years have come from shrinking transistor sizes, but IBM's approach is to fine-tune the silicon on the atomic level, meaning that transistors can be designed from the ground up with very specific applications in mind.

Meyerson forecasts that the advances will show up in real products within a couple years, probably in chips to power super-fast wireless networks capable of transmitting a DVD-quality movie in as little as five seconds.

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Computer illiteracy: About 37 percent of people living in the European Union have no computer skills, with Scandinavians being the most computer-literate and Greeks the least, a survey showed on Tuesday.

The study by the EU statistics agency Eurostat showed 65 percent of Greeks, 59 percent of Italians and 57 percent of Hungarians have no basic computer skills, compared with 10 percent in Denmark and 11 percent in Sweden. Britons and Germans also lead the EU's 25 nations in computer literacy, with only 21 and 25 percent of their citizens lacking computer skills.

The survey, which included people aged 16 to 74 years old, showed 11 percent of those with higher education could not use the computer. Among 16 to 24 year olds, some 10 percent lack computer skills, while 65 percent of people ages 55 to 74 are unable to use the computer.

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Crumb competition: A wave of cell phone startups, hoping to attract users to television, music and other premium services, are floundering as they fight over a thin slice of the U.S. market, a report said on Tuesday.

About 30 wireless operators and hundreds of related wireless technology firms have been launched in the past four years, but many are struggling and face losses, The Wall Street Journal said.

In the past 16 months, startup cellular carriers raised at least $1 billion, according to Rutberg & Co., a San Francisco investment bank, the newspaper said. But only 1 percent of cell phone users regularly use their phones to watch videos, even as the number of U.S. cell phone users has doubled over the past six years to 215 million, the paper said.

Venture capitalists and others remain hopeful that the new-media offerings, which have proved popular in Asia, will be equally popular in the United States, the Journal said.

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What's your favorite band?: A test version of the niche social networking site MOG.com launched on Tuesday with the aim of hooking up people based on their taste in music -- a sort of Myspace for music junkies.

The free site, started by former MTV marketing executive David Hyman with $1.4 million from private investors, requires users to download its application, mog-o-matic. The application catalogs the music on users' computer hard drives and monitors what they play the most and what new tunes are added through online downloads and portable music players.

The data is analyzed several ways and is posted to users' MOG web pages, which are open to inspection by the online world at large. Users also are encouraged to create blogs on their pages about their favorite music. The company does not generate music recommendations from the data but does provide 30-second sound links to all users' collections as well as links to Apple's iTunes Music Store and online music retailer Amazon.com.

AP and Reuters contributed to this report.