Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer pauses as he delivers a speech in Zurich October 4, 2007.

BEIJING, March 19 (Xinhuanet) -- Intel and Microsoft will develop parallel computing that allows computers to run faster by dividing tasks over multiple microprocessors instead of using a single processor to perform one task at a time, media reported Wednesday.

The two companies committed 20 million U.S. dollars over the next five years to create research centers focused on parallel computing at two U.S. universities, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of California, Berkeley. The two schools will contribute 15 million dollars toward the research centers.

"Parallelism is the path forward to the unprecedented levels of performance that are needed ... to keep this growth going," said Andrew Chien, director of Intel research.

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

Parallel computing has been hyped for years as the next big thing in technology, but the time has come, Microsoft, Intel and the universities said, to make it a reality.

It could lead to major advances in robotics or software that could translate documents in real time in multiple languages, for example, or a digital personal health care assistant.

"We're really in the midst of a revolution in the computing industry," said Tony Hey, executive vice president of external research at Microsoft Research, "and it really will profoundly affect the way we develop software" for supercomputers, server computers that form the backbone of corporate networks, desktop and laptop computers, as well as, ultimately, handheld devices.