News
IEEE Spectrum names RapidMind a winner in its 2007 Winners and Losers edition
Waterloo, Ontario - January 11, 2007 - In its annual Winners and Losers edition of Spectrum magazine, IEEE has named the RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform one of the 5 best technologies of the year. Each year, Spectrum does a round-up of what it considers to be the 5 best and 5 worst technology projects of the year. This year, RapidMind received the thumbs up for providing a software development platform that allows software vendors to deliver high performance on a new generation of multi-core and stream processors.
In the article, entitled “Cure for the Multicore Blues”, [1] author Harry Goldstein outlines the history of the company, from its roots at the University of Waterloo with co-founder Dr. Michael McCool to what it is today: A fast growing, venture-backed company that provides a solution to the growing problem of how to program multi-core processors. With the days of doubling processor clock-speed behind us, processor vendors have turned to adding more processor cores in order to provide raw performance increases. Unfortunately, this puts the responsibility in the hands of the software developer to take advantage of this potential. This can be a difficult task.
With the RapidMind platform, ISVs can target multi-core processors while still focusing on their application. From the article, Michael McCool states, “I wanted to build something that I could teach in about 10 minutes, that you could use without mental overhead so you can focus on the algorithms, not the details of the particular processor,” he explains.
From the article, Spectrum says why they feel RapidMind is a Winner: “It works. Realtime Technology, of Munich, used RapidMind to create the first real-time ray-tracing visualization program for customers like DaimlerChrysler and Porsche. IBM is touting the platform as an invaluable tool for Cell microprocessor programmers.”
[1] “Cure for the Multicore Blues”, January 2007 issue of IEEE Spectrum. ©2007 IEEE, Inc.