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, ...

Building a functioning 16-bit processor or CPU inside Microsoft Excel, with its own memory, output, and custom assembly language, is an impressive - if not entirely useful - feat. This is because ...

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 ...

What do the HP-1000 and the DEC VAX 11/730 have in common with the video games Tempest and Battlezone? More than you might think. All of those machines, along with many others from that time period, ...

Our ability to continuously shrink the features of our silicon-based processors appears to be a thing of the past, which has materials scientists considering ways to move beyond silicon. The top ...

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 ...

India has taken a big step in its semiconductor journey by creating the Vikram 32-bit processor. It is a home-grown microchip built to power space missions and survive tough launch conditions. On ...