AD
新华网2月13日电 相信大家早已听闻谷歌光纤惊人的数据传输速度。如果把谷歌光纤的速度比作是跑车的速度，那目前普通的家庭宽带就好比是婴儿车。但这还不算快。据美国科技博客Gizmodo报道，IBM日前研制出了一种新型的传输方式，如果用上面的例子来比较，这可谓是喷气式战机。
IBM研究人员近日在瑞士研制出了一种高能效数模转换器（analog-to-digital converter）的雏形，它能让网络传输速度达到每秒400G，是谷歌光纤速度的400倍，是目前美国平均网速的5000倍。以这种速度下载一部时长2小时的4K高清电影仅需几秒。总而言之，快！
事实上，IBM研制这款数模转换器芯片的目的不是为了高速下载影片，而是为澳大利亚和南非的射电望远镜阵列“平方公里阵列”提供支持，以便观察数百万光年外的宇宙空间，使人类对大爆炸时期的宇宙有更深入的了解。到2024年“平方公里阵列”射电望远镜项目完工时，它每天要收集大约1EB(exabyte )的数据，相当于1千亿GB。
当然这还不算世界上最快的网速。有报道称英国研究人员近日通过采用新网络协议的方式可以让光纤上的网速达到每秒1.4TB。
译者：张免
百度新闻与新华网国际频道合作稿件，转载请注明出处。Fast internet is fast. Google Fiber"s gigabit connections? That"s like driving a sports car compared to the go-cart-speed connection that"s probably in your house. But new technology from IBM opens the door for connections that are beyond fast. Comparatively, it"s like flying a fighter jet.
IBM researchers in Switzerland just unveiled the prototype for an energy efficient analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that enables connections as fast as 400 gigabits per second. That"s 400 times faster than Google Fiber and about 5,000 times faster than the average U.S. connection. That"s fast enough to download a two-hour-long, 4K ultra high definition movie in mere seconds. In short, that"s incomprehensibly fast.
The ADC chip itself was actually built for loftier purposes than downloading episodes of Planet Earth, though. It"s actually bound for the Square Kilometer Array in Australia and South Africa to help us peer hundreds of millions of light years into space, hopefully to give us a better idea of what the universe was like around the time of the Big Bang. This massive radio telescope will devour data, too. It"s expected to gather over an exabyte every day when it"s finished in 2024. That"s over 100 billion gigabytes.
Believe it or not, 400 gigabit isn"t even the fastest connection the world has seen. For that you"ll have to go to the United Kingdom where researchers recently developed 1.4 terabit internet using commercial-grade hardware. That"s warp speed.
