For a given peak speed, nonstop journeys are about three times as fast as those with intermediate stops.

Hitachi says its model has hit a theoretical peak speed of 810 meters a minute, or 44.3 feet a second.

According to Intel, however, the 10Gbps isn't just a theoretical peak speed, but usable bandwidth.

At peak speed, it will be able to execute an estimated 25 million instructions a second.

PC's that use Intel's 486 microprocessor have peak speeds of 50 megahertz.

"Based on what we know about the machine achieving peak speeds, it's not a well-balanced machine," he added.

By comparison, the fastest supercomputers today reach peak speeds of three billion to five billion floating point operations per second.

These numbers comes within 20% of the peak floating-point speed of the processor.

Let's see how long it would take to get to 2GB of data, assuming reliable connections transferring at peak speeds.

The company said the first prototype would be completed in two years and would reach peak speeds of 300 billion mathematical operations a second.