Industry Giants Try to Break Computing’s Dead End

Intel and Microsoft 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.[click heading for more]