The company’s technology is aimed at easing the development of systems based on parallel processors and SIMD support hardware, amongst others. Such architectures are increasingly being applied to mainstream applications in communications and consumer electronics.

Under the so-called “sieve system” parts of the program are marked off with the "sieve" marker and inside these “sieve blocks” it is simple and safe for the compiler to perform automatic parallelization. The compiler can then provide feedback to the programmer about how the software could be changed to improve parallelism.

The sieve system can be used with processors that have non-uniform memory architectures and use DMA, the company said. It can also work with non-uniform data structures as well as the more common streaming applications.

Codeplay (Edinburgh, Scotland) works with customers to produce special versions of C/C++ compilers that support multicore processors. The company said it offers a range of customization options for a programming model. Codeplay announced in May 2005 that its compiler technology has been chosen by Ageia Technologies Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), a supplier of hardware-acceleration physics chips for games, for use with Ageia’s PhysX processor. The project had started mid-February 2005, and the first prototypes of the compiler were shipped within 8 weeks, Codeplay said.

Codeplay has also announced that it is a contributing member of the Khronos Group, an industry consortium focused on the creation of open-standard, royalty-free APIs for the handling of graphics. Codeplay said it would be active in the development of OpenGL ES 2.X shader compiler technology, which is intended to bring accelerated 3D and 2D graphics applications to embedded platforms.

Codeplay was founded by Andrew Richards in 1999, a game developer who saw a need for development tools that could keep pace with advances in processor technology. Since December 2000, Codeplay has been backed by Jez San, the founder of games software company Argonaut Software and Argonaut Risc Cores, a precursor company to processor licensing company ARC International plc.