By Stacey Higginbotham
Microsoft and Intel this summer both snapped up companies with technology that helps software developers build programs that take advantage of multicore chips. Last July I pulled together a list of five startups to watch in the multicore programming space, and prompted by Microsoft announcing on Monday (technically the first day of autumn) that it had bought one of them, I decided to take a look at where those five startup are now. Intel has purchased two of them — Rapid Minds and Cilk Arts — while Microsoft has bought Interactive Supercomputing. This leaves Tilera, which just launched its first multicore chip for the communications market, and Replay Solutions, a company that makes software that acts like a “TiVo for software crashes” by debugging code for multicore chips, still independent.
