BANGALORE, INDIA: With a view to gain additional expertise in the development of applications that aims at multi-core processors, California based chip-maker Intel has acquired two software companies during the past one month period.

As per media reports, the chip giant acquired RapidMind and Cilk Arts, both are into the field of multi-core processing. However, the financial details of the acquisitions are yet to be disclosed.

Both, RapidMind and Cilk are small companies, which employs less than fifty workers. While Cilk was acquired at the end of last month, Rapidmind was bought earlier this week.

In June, making for a total of three, Intel had purchased Wind River Systems, who writes software for embedded devices.

Earlier in June, Intel purchased a software company called Wind River Systems.

Intel will retain the majority of RapidMind's staff and will go on serving the present customers of RapidMind, which is based in Waterloo.

"Over the last few years, there has been a gradual emergence of multicore microprocessors. It's put parallelism in more and more machines," James Reinders, chief evangelist and director of marketing and sales at Intel, was quoted as saying by media reports.

A multicore processor is defined as any chip with more than one processing core. Today, almost all Intel chips that go into laptops, desktops, and servers have at least two cores. The challenge for Intel is to make sure that applications take advantage of all the cores-so-called parallelism. This has historically presented a challenge for software programmers.