Semiconductor companies are whipping up a new generation of chips to bring richer video and better battery life to personal computers and help them hold off threats from tablets and increasingly powerful smart phones.
Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., whose processors are the "brains" of PCs, are unveiling significant changes to their chips' designs at this week's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Tablet computers and other gadgets have taken on many of the tasks once performed by PCs, and there are already signs that those devices - led by Apple Inc.'s iPad - are eating away at PC sales.
Intel and AMD are responding with new chips designed to make people think twice before picking a tablet over a new PC. The new chips won't dampen the success of tablets, but they will make traditional, low-cost computers more competitive - by making them better at doing graphics-intensive tasks and playing video.
The improvements that Intel and AMD make to their products are felt with every keystroke or click of a mouse, even if most computer buyers aren't paying attention to the intricacies of chip design.
For example, people have come to expect the benefits of Moore's Law, even if they don't know the technical specifics underlying the prediction that computer processors' performance will double every two years. The principle has guided the industry for more than 40 years, and is a key reason why computers have gotten smarter even as they've gotten smaller.
One major change in chip design that Moore's Law enabled and consumers felt came several years ago. That's when Intel and AMD took chips known as "memory controllers," which have historically been separate from a computer's main processor, and put them on the same piece of silicon as the processor itself.
The controllers act as middlemen between the processor and a computer's memory. Shortening the distance between the parts cuts the amount of time they needed to talk to each other, helping the computers work faster.
A similar thing is happening in the new generation of chips.
This time, Intel and AMD have thrown another feature - graphics, which too had historically been handled by a separate chip - also onto the same silicon as the computer's main, general-purpose processor.
And by coupling graphics more tightly with a computer's main processor, there's another benefit besides faster communication. The power the parts need to talk to each other is also reduced, leading to longer battery life.
Think of what's happening in chips like what's happened with cell phones: Technical innovations mean more stuff can fit into a smaller space. In the case of computer processors, Moore's Law is driven by the fact that transistors, the tiny on-off switches that regulate the flow of data in computer chips, keep getting smaller.
"It's a natural evolution of integration," said Jon Peddie, who studies the semiconductor industry as president of Jon Peddie Research. "We keep putting more and more stuff into the processor - now it's graphics' turn to get shoved into the processor along with all the stuff that previous generations have shoved in. The big difference this time is because of the processors' smaller size, the capability of the graphics is significantly better."