In March 2009, Intel announced that over 1,000 universities in 72 countries worldwide had joined the Intel® Academic Community . The community delivers parallel programming and visual computing curricula to universities. As most new processors shipped are multi-core, software development is shifting from serial to parallel programming.

Higher Education students benefiting from parallel programming classes

Intel is committed to preparing future software developers to "think parallel," by providing professors with curriculum, research, training, access to new technologies and providing a professional network of academic peers for Computer and Information Technology faculty.  Curriculum developed with these universities, and with academic curriculum bodies such as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society, are delivered to universities via the online Intel Academic Community and through specialized professor training. Professors also share their curriculum via the website .

Since March 2007, over 1,680 professors have participated worldwide and over 100,000 students have directly benefited from parallel programming classes and Intel Software Development Tools. In Asia Pacific, 487 universities participate in 14 countries (Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand), with 170 universities participating in China alone.