Google buys PeakStream - programming tool maker

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition was first reported Tuesday by The Register, and The Wall Street Journal confirmed the news.

Newer computers contain advanced processors, but it's often a challenge to write software that can unlock that power. PeakStream and competitor RapidMind are working on just that problem.

Software is most often designed to run in a linear fashion on a single processing core, but multicore chips can handle two or more tasks simultaneously. At the same time, graphics chips are increasingly suited not just for drawing elaborate videogame scenes or architectural renderings, but also general-purpose programming as well.

And ordinary computers can be spruced up with gaming chips such as the Cell Broadband Engine chip co-developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. Such programming tasks are difficult; IBM released a research project called Octopiler to try to make programming Cell easier, for example.