Intel has acquired multicore software specialist RapidMind
with plans to integrate RapidMind's platform and Intel software
products and technologies, including the Intel Ct technology for
data parallelism.
Intel announced the acquisition on a blog on 19 August.
"RapidMind proved itself to be an innovative company with
advanced technology for helping software developers with data
parallel programming for multicore processors and accelerators.
Their joining Intel will let us do even greater things together,"
said James Reinders, an Intel expert in parallelism.
Intel outlined plans for RapidMind products while boasting that
it already offers complete OpenMP 3.0 support in its Fortran and
C/C++ compilers for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X; support for Intel
Threading Building Blocks that spans those operating systems and
more with support for platforms including Intel, PowerPC, and
SPARC; and its recently introduced Intel Parallel Studio with
support for parallel processing for the Visual Studio
developer.
"This year we will introduce the beta for our product based on
Intel Ct technology, and next year we will introduce the result of
integration of Cilk++ as well as RapidMind into our product lines.
There will be more things to unveil too - but this blog is getting
a bit too long to explain all that now!" said Reinders.
Intel said that all of these technologies and products
complement each other, and "offer the diversity and complete
development solutions needed for a multicore world with
forward-scaling built-in".
Intel also issued a second blog post on the afternoon of August
19, encouraging its audience to "join many Intel parallelization
experts at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) September 22-24, 2009 in
San Francisco, including folks from the RapidMind and Ct technology
team."
The acquisition comes of the heels of Intel's $884m acquisition
Wind River Systems, announced in June. Wind River develops
operating systems, middleware, and software design tools for a
variety of embedded computing systems.
Its main products include VxWorks, a proprietary and
multicore-ready real-time operating system, and commercial-grade
Linux software platforms. With that move, Intel targeted embedded
systems and mobile handheld devices as it continued to extend
itself beyond its traditional PC boarders.
Intel did not disclose the purchase price for RapidMind.
RapidMind was founded five years ago as Serious Hack by
University of Waterloo professor Michael McCool and Stefanus Du
Toit to commercialise Sh, a programming system created at the
Canada school.
Suzanne Deffree is managing editor, news, at Electronic
News
A version of this story originally appeared onElectronicsWeekly.com.