Seemingly out of left field, Google has bought PeakStream, the two-year-old start-up whose young tools make it easier to program multi-core processors by kinda doing the parallelizing for you if you write to its APIs. Then you can run the program on a variety of chips.

PeakStream has been out talking to just about everybody the last few months.

Apparently Google's idea is to use the widgetry exclusively in-house to boost server performance. It's hard to tell. All Google's saying is that "We believe the PeakStream team's broad technical expertise can help build products and features that will benefit our users. We look forward to providing them with additional resources as they continue developing high-performance applications for modern multi-core systems."

Can swing either way, right?

Anyway, PeakStream is no longer selling its platform. In fact, its whole site has disappeared into the ether.

The news may or may not come as a blow to AMD, because PeakStream has been focused on ATI chips and its disappearance inside the yawning Googleplex could make things more challenging for the rest of the market, particularly the financial services, medical imaging, defense and oil and gas folks it was aimed at.

On the other hand, it may be good for AMD if Google starts buying ATI GPUs by the boatload to rebuild its vast armada of servers. At least that's what the Wall Street Journal suggested.

However, the widgetry is equally applicable to plain old multi-core x86 chips as to CPU+GPU combinations, which is what Google may really want it for.

PeakStream did Linux HPC clusters first and concentrated on CPU+GPU integration so programmers didn't have to know much about graphics programming but using it has been described as trading programming time for gigaFLOPS because of the overhead it's thought to have added. It just moved two or three months ago on to Windows.

Naturally acquisition terms were not disclosed. PeakStream launched last fall with $17 million in second-round money from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Foundation Capital and was run by ex-Sun low-end server honcho Neil Knox.

The last man standing now becomes PeakStream rival RapidMind.