By providing software tools, Intel wants to get programmers to build software that takes advantage of the large number of cores and multithreading capabilities in its upcoming Larrabee processor to execute and run a larger number of tasks at once.

"Intel is creating an entire family of developer tools to help speed and ease the shift to parallel computing and software design," said Bill Kircos, an Intel spokesman.

The beginning of its efforts to attract programmers came earlier this week when it released a beta version of Intel Parallel Composer, which the company calls its "first" software tool that allows Windows developers to adopt parallelism for multicore computing. The Composer speeds up software development by incorporating parallelism to multiple compilers including the C/C++ compiler.

"The public beta of our Intel Parallel Composer is another new product for us to better help Windows developers adopt parallelism for multicore [computing]," Kircos said.

Intel Parallel Composer currently is compatible only with Windows, and new features that debuted in the tool will be available sometime next year for the Mac OS X and Linux compilers, an Intel spokesman said.