Intel announced yesterday that it had mastered a new design that makes computing more powerful, less expensive and so much more efficient that mobile devices like cellphones may soon accomplish tasks reserved until recently for desktop computers and other equipment with larger processors. Executives at the world’s largest manufacturer of computer chips said they had achieved this long-sought goal by using new materials to make transistors — the microscopic switches found on all computer chips — so their size could be reduced significantly. The development means that the density of transistors on a chip can be doubled, making computers faster, and that the cost of powering transistors can be cut by nearly a third, the company said. ‘Ten years ago, many of us wondered if we’d ever get to this point. Not only have we gotten to the point, but it probably didn’t take us quite as much time as we thought it would have,’ Mark T. Bohr, a senior fellow at Intel, said in a written statement. Hours after Intel publicly disclosed it had reached this milestone, International Business Machines announced that it had developed a similar technology in collaboration with Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s […]