Rapidmind gets $10m for multi-core development

A STARTUP that provides a programming environment for multi-threaded processing has grabbed itself $10m in funding from vulture capitalists eager to see Moore's Law pushed forward through 2007.

Rapidmind's Development Platform takes single-threaded code and translates it into threaded code appropriate for the device its running on. Currently, it can be adapted for IBM/Sony's Cell processor and Nvidia's Stream GPU units.

The idea is that these kind of programming environments make it easy to get massive performance increases through threading code in an efficient way. Learning how to thread code well can be a tough development job, and RMDP allows developers to concentrate on the purpose of the code, not the nature of the execution.

Nvidia is pushing its graphics cards hard as a platform for massively multi-threaded processing applications, such as financial or environmental simulations. Expect to see some fairly big names getting on board with that in the near future. µ