Intel Makes Another Exciting Software Acquisition

Back in February Intel announced it was acquiring Linutronix as the folks maintaining real-time Linux (PREEMPT_RT) and other prominent Linux contributions. Today Intel announced another exciting software acquisition for bolstering their open ecosystem.

Intel announced this morning they are acquiring Codeplay Software. Codeplay has been around since 2002 when being founded by Andrew Richards. It's a Scottish company that originally started work on video game tech while in more recent years has been heavily focused on various Khronos Group standards and other HPC-related efforts. Codeplay Software over the years has had its hands in Vulkan work, SPIR-V, HSA, compiling OpenCL C to Vulkan, SYCL-based ComputeCpp, and various other projects revolving around open industry standards.

Intel is acquiring Codeplay.

Codeplay for years has already worked with Intel on the likes of oneAPI for Radeon GPUs, NVIDIA GPU support, SYCL Academy, oneAPI Level Zero, and more. Codeplay has been heavily involved with Intel on broad support for oneAPI L0, SYCL adoption, and more. So it's not too surprising to see Intel now outright acquiring this software company.

Intel wrote in their announcement today of acquiring Codeplay:

This acquisition bolsters both companies’ commitment to open collaboration and standards – particularly driving the adoption of SYCL and the oneAPI ecosystem. Intel and Codeplay have worked together to define and extend open standard programming models that work across multiple platforms and devices. Codeplay is highly active on Khronos standards committees and has been a long-time proponent of the SYCL standard. In fact, Codeplay developers currently chair the Khronos SYCL Working Group and some ISO C++ standards, act as the OpenCL Spec editor, and significantly contribute to numerous other standards.

Codeplay has a proven record of ecosystem leadership within the developer community, while developing and maintaining compilers and runtimes for CPUs, GPUs, DSPs and many other advanced processor architectures to achieve high processing performance for AI and HPC. In the last two years, Codeplay was selected by leading open science computing sites, including NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as well as a collaboration of the Argonne National Laboratory with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to provide oneAPI SYCL compilers for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. Bolstered by the strength of Intel, Codeplay will be able to extend the delivery of SYCL solutions into cross-architecture and multi-vendor products, based on open standards and the open source ecosystems upon which they are built.

Intel expects the acquisition to close later this quarter. This is a very exciting deal from the open standards / open-source angle and great to see Intel continuing to invest in the software ecosystem.