1.5 terabyte DVD on way

JAPANESE WIRE the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported that a coalition of academics and electronics combine are designing an optical disk that will eventually be able to store 1.5TB (terabytes) of data.

Although we're unlikely to see such devices until 2010, the consortium, which includes Matsushita, Ricoh, Pioneer, Mitsubishi, and three universities, is plunging $25 million into an R&D project which will start in Spring of 2003.

Reports said that optical disk will use "3D" optical technology likely to use a technique which stores the data in multiple layers.

It will also be backwards compatible with standard DVDs, the reports said, with its storage ability equivalent to around 300 DVDs using the current format. µ

* BY 2010, according to senior Intel architects, a CPU will have processing power equivalent to the brain of a bumble bee.