RapidMind Inc. was a privately held company founded and headquartered in

Waterloo, Ontario Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo (formerly Waterloo County, Ontario, Waterloo County). Waterloo is situated about west-southwest of Toronto. Due to the c ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

, acquired by

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

in 2009. It provided a software product that aims to make it simpler for software developers to target

multi-core A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such a ...

processors and accelerators such as

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

s (GPUs).

History

RapidMind was started in 2004 based on the academic research related to the Sh project at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality ...

. It received a seed round of financing (amount undisclosed) at the beginning of 2006, and raised its

Series A round A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

of $10 million Canadian in April 2007. RapidMind was acquired by

on 19 August 2009. Intel continued to sell RapidMind's primary product, a Multi-core Development Platform, through 2010. The RapidMind team and technology was integrated into the

Intel Ct Intel Ct is a Parallel programming model, programming model developed by Intel to ease the exploitation of its future Multi-core processor, multicore chips, as demonstrated by the Intel Tera-Scale, Tera-Scale research program. It is based on the ex ...

research project. The results of the combination were introduced in September 2010 as

Intel Array Building Blocks Intel Array Building Blocks (also known as ArBB) was a C++ library developed by Intel Corporation for exploiting data parallel portions of programs to take advantage of multi-core processors, graphics processing units and Intel Many Integrated Co ...

Multi-core development platform

The platform was exposed as a set of

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

libraries, which provide types and operations used to express parallel computations."RapidMind: C++ Meets Multicore"
Dr Dobbs Journal (2007-06-08). Retrieved on 2008-10-04. The programming model was primarily

data parallel Data parallelism is parallelization across multiple processors in parallel computing environments. It focuses on distributing the data across different nodes, which operate on the data in parallel. It can be applied on regular data structures lik ...

, although it was sufficiently generic to express task-parallel operations. The platform targeted

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

processors, GPUs (via

OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-progra ...

), and the

Cell processor Cell is a Multi-core processor, multi-core microprocessor microarchitecture that combines a general-purpose PowerPC Central processing unit, core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessor, coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate m ...

References

GPGPU Intel acquisitions {{tech-company-stub