Microsoft, Intel to jointly fund research

Intel and Microsoft committed $20 million over the next five years to create research centers focused on parallel computing at two US universities.

The two companies will work with University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of California, Berkeley. Together, the two schools will contribute $15 million toward the research centers.

Parallel computing allows computers to run faster by dividing tasks over multiple microprocessors instead of using a single processor to perform one task at a time, but not many software companies know how to write software to harness this computing power.

It could lead to major advances in robotics or software that could translate documents in real time in multiple languages, for example.

For decades, the technology industry has been driven by the 1965 observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the computing power of chips doubles roughly every two years, in what has become known as Moore's Law.