PC Tech World: speed

Showing posts with label speed. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Researchers create hollow fiber optic cable, almost reach the speed of light

Fiber optic cables are usually made of glass or plastic but those materials actually slow down the transmission of light ever so slightly. Researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK have created a hollow fiber optic cable filled with air that's 1000 times faster than current cables. Since light propagates in air at 99.7 percent of the speed of light in a vacuum, this new hollow fiber optic cable is able to reach data speeds of 10 terabytes (!) per second. Now that's fast. While the idea isn't new, it's previously been hampered by signal degradation when light travels around corners. This new hollow fiber optic cable reduces data loss to a manageable 3.5dB/km, making it suitable for use in supercomputer and data center applications. Isn't science wonderful?

[Image credit: qwrrty, Flickr]

Via: ExtremeTech, Gizmodo Australia

Source: Nature

Monday, March 4, 2013

Chrome for Android build may tout a proxy-based speed boost

A fast smartphone will only go so far toward improving browser load times if the connection isn't there to back it up. If a discovery within a recent build of Chrome for Android is any hint, Google may have its own solution to that bottleneck. New code flags reference Google-run proxy servers that would squeeze pages using SPDY, improving performance at least slightly for the bandwidth-deprived. While there's not much more to go on, the finding is enough to suggest that roughly equivalent boosters like Amazon Silk and Opera Turbo could have a real fight on their hands. We'd advise caution when the flags are only accessible by running an ADB command -- they're clearly not ready for prime time. Should Google flick the switch on compression for Chrome's main release track, though, Android users may not need a third-party browser to sip the web through a thin straw.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Google's Zopfli compression algorithm aims to speed up the web

Google's Zopfli compression aims to speed up the web

Google's latest attempt to squeeze data into increasingly smaller and smaller spaces comes with a rather silly sounding name inspired by Swiss bread. Zopfli is a compression algorithm that Mountain View claims can create files between three and eight percent smaller than Zlib. Of course, the trade off is that it requires between two and three times as much CPU time to finish shoving everything into a neat little package. Obviously this isn't an ideal solution for on-the-fly compression. However, decompression speeds are unchanged and don't require a special library to unpack. The most obvious use of the technology will be in the mobile space where static website elements an be compressed once and transferred frequently. That would mean quicker load times, less battery drain and, perhaps most importantly in this era of capped data plans, less bandwidth usage. For a few more details check out the source link.

Via: CNET

Source: Google