Intel has acquired a little five-year-old Canadian number called RapidMind that specializes in parallel programming for multi-core processors and accelerators.

It was originally founded to commercialize a programming system called Sh and now has a C++ development platform to create single-threaded applications that leverage multi-core Intel, AMD and Cell chips as well as GPUs.

Its widgetry will eventually be integrated into Intel's upcoming Ct technology for data parallelism, which is supposed beta by the end of the year.

Intel has also acquired another little outfit called Cilk Art meaning to integrate the Cilk++ cross-platform solution into its multi-core widgetry too in hopes of smoothing the path for legacy apps that have trouble exploiting multi-core processors.

With Cilk++, an application gets to keep its serial semantics and use existing serial methodologies for programming, tooling, debugging, and regression testing.

Terms of either acquisition were not disclosed. Both were university spin-outs.