Intel and Microsoft have said that they plan to finance two groups of university researchers to start over and design a new generation of computing systems intended to break the industry out of a technological cul-de-sac that threatens to end decades of performance increases in computers. If the research efforts succeed, this would enable the development of new kinds of portable computers and would help computer engineers tackle areas as diverse as speech recognition, image processing, health care systems and music. For example, a music professor at the University of California, Berkeley, David L Wessel, envisions a new era of digital musical instruments that would begin to match the rich versatility of acoustic instruments like violins and pianos.

The research grant, worth $20 million over five years, will create independent laboratories at Berkeley and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, that will be charting a way to reinvent computing. Each will work on hardware, software and a new generation of applications powered by computer chips containing multiple processors. The University of Illinois plans to contribute an additional $8 million to the project and the Berkeley project is applying for an additional $7 million from a state-supported program to match the industry grants.

The computer industry has generally stopped relying on regular increases in the processing speed of chips. In recent years it has bet instead that future advances in speed and energy efficiency will come from putting multiple processors on a single silicon chip. Numbers of computer functions can then be done in parallel rather than sequentially.

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