Intel, Microsoft Fund Multicore Research

Intel and Microsoft will fund researchers at two universities working on new programming techniques for multicore chips, sources told the Wall Street Journal. The companies will reportedly provide $2 million annually for five years, to speed the development of chips that can contain dozens—or even hundreds—of microprocessors of multiple types. One of the grants is expected to go to UC Berkeley.

"Everybody is madly racing toward multicore technology, and they don't have a clue about how to program it," said one Stanford professor. Possible applications include media-rich programs like 3-D imaging, pattern recognition, and financial analysis, all of which require hardware/software combinations that can process large, complicated quantities of data.