Researchers’ push: reinvent computing

March 24, 2008 | Source: New York Times

Intel and Microsoft plan to fund researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Illinois $20 million to start over and design a new generation of computing systems.

The move was motivated in part by an increasing sense that the industry is in a crisis of a sort because advanced parallel software has failed to emerge quickly, threatening to end decades of performance increases in computers.

The new systems will be designed to perform tasks that today’s computers have difficulty accomplishing, like recognizing human gestures and speech. An advanced parallel computing system will also help scientists create Web browsers that can more quickly pull in complex data, process it and display it.