One of the stops on the press preview of the exhibit hall was the RapidMind booth, where we learned of some astonishing performance increases made possible by their Multi-Core Development Platform. The platform is comprised of a Code Optimizer (analyzes and optimizes computations), Load Balancer (synchs work to keep all cores fully utilized), Data Manager (reduces bottlenecks), and Diagnostics. The API integrates with C++ Windows or Linux apps and requires no new tools, compilers, or workflow. Applications that are not multi-core enabled can take advantage of all available cores (including GPUs and Cell processors) and will automatically scale to future additional cores.

What kind of numbers are they claiming? Performance increases of 8X on financial applications, 10X on digital media and medical imaging, and 17X running business intelligence apps. As multi-core processors proliferate and hardware accelerators move into vogue, tools are needed to help developers get their code to take advantage of all this new power. It’s a crowded, but growing, market that is rife with conflicting claims and lots of players. From a customer perspective, it’s all good, as the vast majority of the players are offering cheap and easy eval access to their tools. From the vendor side, it’s a race to become big and viable so that they can survive the inevitable consolidation that should be here in a year or so…