Intel, Microsoft Pledge $20 Million For Multi-Core App Development

Shakil published 19 Mar 2008, 01:09 in main - 232 views

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The Wintel juggernaut, Microsoft and Intel, Tuesday announced that they'll again join forces and spend $20 million over the next five years on academic research aimed at pushing the envelope on parallel computing.

As Intel and other chipmakers embark on their multi-core journeys, they've tried as best they can to give software developers new ways of writing software to take advantage of the potential performance increases inherent in packing more processors into chips.

With that in mind, the two companies announced that they've committed $20 million to set up and fund new research facilities at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The two universities hope to add an additional $15 million to the effort from their own coffers.

The new research centers will focus on parallel programming efforts, including applications and operating systems that are able to take advantage of multi-core processors. Though processors have continued to get more powerful over the last few years, industry leaders have argued that chipmakers are approaching a point where speed will level out. More processing cores could help increase performance, but only if software can be written to take advantage of the new chips.