SiliconBeat

After gobbling up several software companies recently, Intel announced in June that it was plunking down $884 million for the Alameda software firm Wind River Systems.

But that hardly satisfied the Santa Clara chip giant’s software appetite.

So over the past few weeks, Intel has picked up two more software businesses - Rapidmind of Waterloo, Ontario and Cilk of Lexington, MA, according to information posted on an Intel blog.

The two latest acquisitions bring Intel skill in the arcane art of parallel programming, which involves writing software for so-called multiple-core chips featuring more than one central processing unit.