Intel acquires Cilk and Rapidmind

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Over the last few months, Intel has gone on a shopping spree – of software companies, that is.

By the end of last month, it quietly acquired Cilk and then just last week, the company has also purchased Rapidmind. These two are both small companies with under 50 employees.

These software companies specialize on parallelism – maximizing application performance by taking advantage of on multicore processors.

So what’s the reason behind the buy-outs?

In a phone interview with CNet News last Friday, James Reinders, chief evangelist and director of marketing and sales at Intel explained that the gradual emergence of multicore processors over the last few years has put parallelism in more machines.

“If you look at traditional applications, ones that we use every day, it’s fair to say that most are not exploiting parallelism–at least not to the full extent,” Reinders said.

With the two software companies under its wings, Intel aims to better facilitate parallel programming to make the most out of multicores.

Intel didn’t reveal how much the two companies cost. Care to make a guess?

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10315534-64.html