Codeplay

History

Codeplay was founded in 2002 by Andrew Richards, an experienced games developer, and formerly head of Software Development at Eutechnyx. Initial funding for the company was provided by Jez San OBE, founder of Argonaut Games and ARC International, who remains the majority shareholder. Codeplay began its business developing compilers aimed at games programmers, releasing its VectorC compiler for PlayStation 2 and x86 Windows PC. In 2005, Codeplay shifted focus to developing bespoke C/C++ compilers for processor designers, and has since expanded its services to include development of debuggers, runtimes, and testing tools.

In 2011, Codeplay announced that it had provided the real-time car damage system for NASCAR The Game: 2011, utilising its Offload technology

In 2013, Codeplay formed an R&D division, and received Investors in People accreditation.

In 2014, Codeplay announced that it was working on an implementation of the Khronos Group's new provisional standard for heterogeneous computing, SYCL. Codeplay's CEO, Andrew Richards, currently chairs the working group for this standard within the Khronos Group.

Sieve C++ Multicore Programming System

The Sieve C++ Multicore Programming System is a toolset that allows programmers to quickly and easily adapt existing C and C++ software, or write new software, to take advantage of new multi-core processor architectures.

VectorC

VectorC is a Retargetable C/C++ compiler engine used to create C and C++ compilers for custom-built processor architectures. Codeplay describes VectorC as being optimized for SIMD processors, DSPs, vector units and multi core processors.

VectorC, as its name suggests, was designed from the outset to exploit vectorization. It can automatically take advantage of advanced CPU 'vector' units via SIMD instruction such as MMX, SSE/SSE2, 3D Now and Altivec. VectorC is based around a common optimization core so that all appropriate existing optimizations can be used on the new target architecture it is being customized for. The Optimizer can query the back-end to see what optimizations are possible or suitable on the target.

VectorC also supports C++ to C compilation through an ANSI C compliant back-end. This enables the compilation of C++ code, with or without additional language extensions, to any architecture where a C compiler already exists. This feature is used in Codeplay's Sieve C++ Parallel Programming System to generate parallelized code that can be ported to any multicore architecture with a native C compiler.

Codeplay state that VectorC performs all the standard non-vector optimizations expected from high-performance compilers.

The VectorC engine has been designed to cope with multiple memory spaces, distributed latencies and an optimize data-movement using double-buffered streaming DMA when required, in addition to standard write combining and prefetching functions. There is support for Software pipelining, automatically parallelizing loops on pipelined architectures.

VectorC has extensive support for portable intrinsic functions, letting users write complex vector operations as built in functions. These are converted into the best combination of instructions on each architecture that the source code is compiled for.

Codeplay continues to offer VectorC-based custom compilers to clients. VectorC is also described by Codeplay as being the basis of Sieve C++ Multicore Programming System.

Research

Codeplay has contributed to the following EU-funded research projects: