Like many pre-21st-century technological artifacts including steam locomotives, audio tapes, and 4-bit microprocessors—16-bit processors have reached the end of their useful life. Steve Leibson, ...

The start of the much-anticipated death of 16-bit processors is upon us. Because of insufficient forecasted demand, March 30, 2007, is the final date that Intel will accept orders for its MCS51, ...

“We always hoped that something like this could be built – now we know that it can be built,” says Max Shulaker, professor at MIT and corresponding author on this latest report. Carbon nanotubes have ...

An artist's conception of a carbon nanotube—a single-atom-thick layer of carbon rolled into a tube. Image Credit: Geoff Hutchison, flickr Share This week, a computational milestone made its debut: a ...

Carbon nanotubes are nearly atomically thin carbon structures — just 1-1.2 nanometers thin. "Pure" carbon nanotubes are a powerful semiconductor, one that can compete with silicon for integration into ...

Curiously, the Intel 8086 was conceived as a stopgap while the more technologically ambitious 32-bit iAPX 432 struggled with ...

Scientists at MIT built a 16-bit microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes and even ran a program on it, a new paper reports. Silicon-based computer processors seem to be approaching a limit to how small ...

They demonstrated a 16-bit microprocessor with more than 14,000 CNFETs that performs the same tasks as commercial microprocessors. The Nature paper describes the microprocessor design and includes ...

Back in the hazy days of the early home computers, many of us would rejoice at running our first BASIC applications, some of us even built our own 8-bit system from a handful of ICs and felt elated ...